


while the candlelight's still glowing

by elanoides



Series: when the night has come [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Background Beau/Jester, Fairy Tale Retellings, M/M, Widofjord Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 23:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19283278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanoides/pseuds/elanoides
Summary: There, framed in the doorway, is a sea-green figure with golden eyes. Caleb scrambles to his feet. “Who are you?”[A Beauty and the Beast AU... sort of.]





	while the candlelight's still glowing

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Howard Ashman’s original soundtrack for Beauty and the Beast. Section titles, first line, and general mood from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. For Widofjord Week day 4— “Promises”.

 

_I. which seems to lie before us_

 

The sea is calm tonight. The surface is smooth to the horizon, an endless expanse that flows without breaking. Caleb has learned to distrust a sea like that. On the Windflower Cliffs, silence means a storm.

He stops and looks out to sea, searching the clouds for rain bands or thunderheads, but he can’t see much farther than the edge of the cliffs. The sun has just set— he can’t see it, but he knows— and darkness is falling fast.

Caleb turns back to the narrow cowpath and continues onward. Nott has gone to scout ahead; if she finds anything, food or shelter, she’ll tell him. For now he’ll just keep walking.

The wind picks up, whipping at his coat and the end of his scarf. These cliffs are barren; the largest plants are the anemone flowers—windflowers, they’re called here— that dot the ground. Tonight, if they don’t find shelter, they’ll have to sleep in the storm.

Caleb keeps walking.

It grows darker, and darker still, until night has fully fallen. The smell of rain is heavy and cloying on his tongue, and the wind is beginning to hiss as it swirls. He pulls the collar of his coat higher around his neck.

A pair of glossy, slit-pupiled eyes flash up ahead, and then Nott is barreling down the path toward him. She skids to a stop and pants, “Caleb! I found something— there’s a castle right up here! There are candles inside, I think we can go in!”

“A castle?” Caleb says, and then they’re both running, Nott surefooted, him stumbling in her wake. They scramble over the rise, plunge down the next slope, and then even in the dark Caleb can see it: a tall, crooked shape built of blue-gray sea stone. In the highest window, he sees a flickering speck of light.

They run for the castle, chased by the howling wind and the smell of rain, and the first drops begin to fall just as they dash through the gate of the garden surrounding the castle. The gate latches behind them with a heavy _clunk_.

The rain has stopped.

The wind, too, Caleb realizes, with a sinking feeling. He turns and reaches his hand over the gate, and raindrops patter against his skin. But no rain falls within the bounds of the castle garden.

“Well, that’s lucky,” Nott says.

“ _Ja_ , well,” Caleb says. “If this is not something worse.”

It takes a long minute to pick their way through the winding paths of the garden and the masses of flowers, but the door swings open with barely a touch. Caleb and Nott pile through, and it whisks shut behind them with a muffled _boom._

The foyer is dim. A candelabrum topped with three flickering candles stands on a small side table, and a massive tall-case clock looms to one side, its pendulum swinging silently. The floor is tiled in alternating white and blue-gray, and the wide staircase that rises at the far end is made of some smooth white stone. Except for the clock and the candelabrum on the table, it is completely bare.

“Guess no one’s here,” Nott says.

“ _Ja,_ but someone must have lit the candles,” Caleb points out.

“They might be magic candles.”

“That is true.”

Nott is still looking around the room, and she darts suddenly to the side table. Caleb takes a step after her, hands rising to cast a spell in defense, but Nott only takes a piece of paper from the table, where it’s pinned under the candelabrum. Standing closer, Caleb can make out the shape of a woman dressed in sleeveless, flowing robes in the candelabrum’s column.

Nott holds the note to the candlelight and reads, “ _Welcome to Windflower Castle. Dinner in the hall. On us._ And it also says, _Don’t touch anything else._ ”

Caleb looks over her shoulder. The message about dinner is in a clear, angular script. The warning below it is scrawled in a much rougher hand. Two different people— which is two more than they’ve seen in days.

Caleb snaps his fingers, and Frumpkin appears on the floor. The brindled cat blinks up at him, then pads off into the shadows of the foyer. Caleb places a hand on Nott’s shoulder and sinks into Frumpkin’s vision.

Frumpkin sniffs around the corners and climbs the staircase at the far end of the foyer. It leads to another wide landing with a staircase on either side, but Frumpkin ignores those and makes for the double doors standing open on one wall. A faint, golden light leaks over the threshold.

“A ballroom,” Caleb whispers to Nott as Frumpkin enters. “There’s a table. Covered in food. A fireplace and candles.”

He blinks out of Frumpkin’s head in time to hear her say, “Well, come on, let’s go!” Nott hurries ahead, and Caleb follows at a slower pace, tugging his coat closer around himself. By the time he gets up the stairs and into the ballroom, she’s already ripping into a turkey leg at the long table placed to one side of the room. Caleb takes the chair next to her and reaches for the nearest dish: potatoes mashed and whipped with butter. Beside that, a steaming beef stew, a dish of roast vegetables, a turkey (now missing one leg), baked apples only the size of his thumb...

He could be careful. Or he could eat now, and be careful on a full stomach.

Caleb starts piling his plate.

By the time he and Nott are done eating, most of the platters are empty, and the chill has left Caleb’s bones. He can still hear the storm rumbling, but it seems distant, far away from this warm, firelit hall.

“Whose castle do you think this was?” Nott asks, toying with the last baked apple.

“I have no idea,” Caleb replies. “But I do not think we should stay.”

Nott sighs a bit. “You’re right. Probably not.”

“We can wait until the storm passes, though. It might blow through.”

“It might,” Nott agrees. She gets out of her chair. “In the meantime, I’m going to go explore.”

“Nott,” Caleb says, suddenly concerned. “You know I do not tell you not to take things, usually. But we do not know who this castle belongs to. You cannot take anything. Even something small might get us in trouble.”

Nott removes a fork from her pocket and places it on the table.

“Like that,” Caleb says.

“I’ll try,” Nott says. “But you know, Caleb, I might get the itch again. With all these shinies here, and no one around?”

“Just try, please?”

“All right.”

Nott departs, leaving the room quiet.

Caleb glances about the table. His eyes fall on a teapot within arm’s reach. It’s steaming gently, and in the dim light, the lacy pattern on the side resembles a smiling face. He could have sworn there had been no teapot there before, but perhaps he was distracted by the food.

He picks up the teapot and smells the steam. It’s chamomile, light and sweet, and Caleb goes to pour before realizing that there are no teacups immediately to hand. He glances around, and—

“Cups are on the tea service,” says a low, rumbling voice.

Caleb freezes, then says carefully, “Excuse me, I think I did not catch that— where are the cups?”

“On the tea service,” the voice says again. Caleb slowly looks down to the teapot. The face painted on the side looks right back with a broad smile, and the mouth moves as it says, “You look like you might need a cup of tea.”

“Ah— _ja_. Yes. I do.”

Caleb puts the teapot down as carefully as he can and goes to the tea service on the far side of the table. Sure enough, there are cups. None appear to have faces, so he takes one at random and returns to his seat.

“Do I— may I pour a cup? From you?”

“Oh, of course,” the teapot says. “That’s what I’m here for.”

So Caleb lifts the teapot in two trembling hands and pours a thin stream of tea into his cup.

“Do you want sugar? It’s over on the service.”

“Ah. No. Thank you.” Caleb sips at the tea. The taste is familiar. So chamomile hasn’t changed, even if the furniture is talking to him. “May I ask your name?”

“Caduceus Clay,” says the teapot. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Caleb Widogast. It is very good to meet you too, Caduceus, although I must admit I have never seen anything like you.”

“Not a lot of people have,” Caduceus agrees, and says... nothing else.

Caleb sips his tea again. “Is this castle enchanted? Cursed?”

“Oh, it’s cursed,” Caduceus says. “Very cursed.”

“Oh, _ja_?”

“Well, I don’t understand the particulars very well myself. You’d have to ask Beau— she’s done quite a lot of research on it.”

Caleb decides to follow along. “Is Beau also a teapot?”

“No, she’s a candelabrum. You probably saw her and Yasha in the hall. They like to keep an eye on visitors. Although we don’t get a lot of visitors.”

“And Yasha was the clock, I suppose?”

“Right,” Caduceus says, smiling.

“Is that everyone here?”

“Your friend who ran upstairs will probably meet Jester. I don’t know if Fjord will come down or not. But that is all of us.”

“Not so many for such a big castle.”

“No,” Caduceus agrees, “but only one of us needs to eat and sleep, so it isn’t much work to keep up either.”

“I see,” Caleb says. “Before I finish this cup of tea and leave with my friend, is there anything else I should know about this castle?”

“If you get caught in the curse, you have to stay here forever,” Caduceus says calmly. “And if you try to leave, you’ll die.”

Caleb tries to still his shaking hands. “That would have been helpful to know up front.”

“You haven’t gotten caught, have you?”

“No— I think not— but it would have been good to know that the curse can trap someone in this castle for eternity—” Caleb throws back the last of his tea and jumps out of his seat. “We should be leaving, thank you for your hospitality, goodbye.”

Caleb dashes out of the room, calling, “Nott!” He skids to a stop between the two tall staircases, but can’t make her out anywhere above him. He pulls a copper wire out of his pocket, folds it on itself, and casts Message. “Nott, if you can hear me, please come down to the foyer, this castle is cursed and we need to get out of here.”

No response. She must be out of range. Caleb keeps listening, straining for the sound of any footfall, though Nott is so stealthy she’s silent more often than not.

And then, splitting through the silence of the castle, there’s a screech. Nott’s screech, and a rush of pattering feet, and a different voice calling something Caleb can’t make out. He turns toward the sound, and before he can even move, Nott is barreling down the stairs, yelling, “Caleb, things are _alive_ in here!”

“I know!” Caleb shouts back. “This castle is cursed, we need to go _now_!”

Nott reaches him, and together they bolt down through the foyer. “What’s happening?” she demands.

“I think there are people in here,” he gasps as they burst through the front doors and out into the garden. “Turned into objects. I talked to a teapot—”

“I saw a feather duster!” Nott yelps.

They rush down the winding garden path, through the terrible quiet that hangs over the castle. Caleb keeps his eyes fixed on the gate ahead; it’s so tangled with flowers that he can barely make it out. He crashes into a flowerbed, stumbles free, keeps running. His feet punch slick holes in the mud of the path until he’s skidding and sliding with every step.

Nott gets to the gate long before he does, and she waits there, bouncing on her toes with impatience. “Caleb, come on!”

“I’m coming,” he shouts back. They’re close, they’re so close, only ten more steps, nine, eight—

and there’s a _roar_.

It’s louder than any roll of thunder, any crashing wave. Caleb stumbles back, stunned.

And with the roar, there is a flash of light. Not lightning— it glows brighter and brighter, until it unfurls into a massive, slit-pupiled eye.

_HALT_ , says a voice that rattles Caleb’s bones.

“Let us out!” Nott shouts at it.

“We haven’t taken anything!” Caleb adds.

The light grows so bright Caleb can barely look at it. _LIAR_. _THIEF_.

Beside Caleb, Nott grows terribly, painfully still.

“Nott?” he whispers.

“I picked a flower,” she says. “One flower. I thought they wouldn’t miss it.”

_THIEF_.

“You can’t have her!” Caleb says, forcing his voice to ring out in the storm. “She isn’t yours!”

_THIEF. TAKER._ _STAY_.

“But he can go!” Nott calls, sharp and sudden. “You can let Caleb go, can’t you?”

The eye swivels to him. _GO_.

“Well?” Nott says. “Caleb?”

There is only one thing to do. Caleb understands this, in a flash as swift as the lightning that still forks fitfully outside the castle. “Walk with me, please.”

So they walk. The eye stares them down where it hangs in the air. It is only seven steps to the gate; Caleb stops there. “Nott,” he says, “be careful, all right?”

“Of course,” she says. “You too. I’ll figure out a way to get out, don’t you worry.”

Caleb nods. “Yes.”

Then he plucks the flower from behind her ear— the bloom is tiny, smaller than his palm, and the petals almost dissolve against his skin. It doesn’t seem worth a curse.

He pushes Nott through the gate. It slams shut behind her, and Nott gasps, then whirls around, grabs the gate and tries to wrench it open.

The eye stares down.

“I will stay,” Caleb tells it. He holds up the flower. “See? I am the thief. So I will stay.”

“ _Caleb_ ,” Nott says.

He stumbles forward, grips her hands when she reaches across to him. Her hands are wet with the rain that does not fall on him. “Listen, please.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“No. You have to go. I will stay here. I will break the curse, or— I don’t know. You have to go, Nott. Please.”

She stares back at him. “Don’t think I’m leaving you here.”

“You should.”

“I won’t. Anyway, Caleb, you left me out here in the rain, and I don’t even have a castle to sleep in tonight, so really—”

“Yes, yes, I am in the wrong, I know—”

“You’re not going to get away with this,” she says, but she’s smiling, even though the rain. “I found a map upstairs. There’s a town close by. I’ll go there. And then we’re gonna break this curse.”

“All right,” Caleb says. “ _Ja_. All right.”

He stands at the gate and watches as her figure vanishes into the night.

When he looks back, the eye is gone.

 

 

_II. the eternal note of sadness_

 

Windflower Castle is marginally less gloomy in daylight. Caleb spent the night in the familiar bounds of his silver thread, but didn’t sleep. Even though the room he found in the east wing is more comfortable than any he’s seen in years, it’s still cursed to hell and back, and he only managed to stare at the ceiling until dawn.

Now, with weak morning light leaking through the windows, he decides to pull himself together and explore the castle. He pushes the door open slowly and snaps Frumpkin out, then blinks briefly into his familiar’s vision and finds the hall empty. Reassured, he steps out, closing the door behind him.

The clock is there.

It’s right next to the door, standing silently against the wall like it was the night before— the night before, when it was down in the foyer, and absolutely not up two flights of stairs next to this bedroom. Standing beside it, he’s reminded of how incredibly massive it is. Seven feet tall, made of polished, pale wood, with a razor-sharp pendulum that really looks more like a sword than part of a clock. And, according to Caduceus, it’s formerly a person named Yasha.

Caleb thinks he’s probably afraid of Yasha.

But he dredges up every ounce of fairy-tale advice he ever heard as a child and addresses the clock as politely as he can. “Hello. My name is Caleb Widogast. I seem to be a guest in this castle. I am only going to look around a little.”

The clock says nothing.

“Goodbye,” Caleb tells the clock, and sets off down the hallway.

He puts his head into several doorways along the hall. There are multiple guest bedrooms, all of which are equally empty. Caleb continues down the hallway and heads toward the staircase.

The hall above the foyer is lit by a massive window set in dozens of panes that takes up most of the back wall. Caleb glances down to the foyer. Both the clock and the candelabrum are absent. He checks over his shoulder, suddenly worried, but the clock doesn’t seem to have followed him.

Caleb descends the staircase and explores the first level. He discovers a sitting room on one side, and glances around the ballroom on the other side, but doesn’t see any sign of the teapot he’d spoken with the night before.

That leaves the second level of the west wing, above the ballroom. Caleb climbs the stairs, footsteps ringing oddly in the quiet of the hall.

This hallway is tiled with blue-gray stone, and it appears to be better kept than the rest of the castle. Some of the doors are locked, and there is a small spiral staircase winding up from one end of the hallway.

But he ignores those and makes for the other end of the hallway, where it turns a corner and vanishes. Light spills through it. He expects a solarium, maybe, or just another large window.

Instead, the hallway ends in a grotto that looks like it was struck by lightning and smoothed over by ocean waves. The walls are rough and craggy, forming an arch above a pedestal that appears to rise from the same rock as the floor. And on the pedestal, beneath a crystalline bell jar, there is a flower.

It’s an anemone, Caleb thinks— a windflower. Native to these cliffs, and spilling from every corner of the castle garden. Its petals are a rich velvet blue, with a dark disk in the center. It bows from the top of a thin green stem.

And it is dying.

There are only four petals left on the flower. As Caleb watches, one of the petals trembles. He finds himself reaching for it, thinking to save the petal, to shield it somehow.

With a final shudder, the petal falls.

Caleb stumbles backward, staring at the flower. It feels like a death. A desecration. He doesn’t know why.

“Oh _no_!” a voice says behind him.

Caleb spins, startled. It takes him a moment to understand what he’s seeing. There is a feather duster floating in the air before him. The feathers form a wide blue skirt, and instead of a handle, there is the miniature head and torso of a woman. Who is also blue, and has a set of curled ram’s horns.

“Beau, come quick!” she calls, and darts forward to hover right beside the dying anemone.

Caleb steps back against the wall and tries to disappear as the candelabrum from the foyer appears around the corner. “You find him?” she asks, then stops dead, staring at the lone anemone and its three wilting petals. “Oh. Shit.”

“They’re falling so fast now,” the feather duster says. “Do you think Fjord knows?”

“He’s gotta, right? We’ll tell him. But first...” The candelabrum turns to look right at Caleb. “You’re Widogast, right?”

“Ah— _ja_. Yes. I am Caleb Widogast.”

“You poor fucker,” the candelabrum says. “Okay. Come with us.”

 

They end up going down to the kitchens behind the ballroom. Caleb trails behind the candelabrum— Beau, as she introduced herself. Jester, the feather duster, vanished in search of Yasha, the tall-case clock.

Beau pushes the doors open and calls, “Hey, Deuce, we gotta talk.” Caleb peers in over her. The kitchen is small, and lit with a handful of simple candles— none animated as Beau is. There’s a sink, a stove, a wall packed with cabinets. And on the table in the middle, the teapot Caleb spoke with the night before.

“What happened?” the teapot— Deuce? Caduceus— asks.

Beau nudges the backs of Caleb’s legs, and he stumbles into the room. “Found Widogast.”

“Oh, hello,” Caduceus says to him, in a tone so sunny Caleb finds himself smiling back. “But what else happened?”

“Another petal fell,” Beau says. “We’re down to three.”

“Oh,” Caduceus says. “Oh dear.” He pulls out a drawer from the table and begins to rifle through it, tossing various teabags and glass jars onto a tray with the tea service.

Beau nods and hops up on the table next to Caduceus. “Yeah. But, lucky break, this guy’s just as cursed as us.”

“That’s true, I suppose. Do you know where Fjord is?”

“Probably the west wing?” Beau shrugs.

Caduceus lifts the tea service precariously and hops down from the table. “I’ll go find him. You get Mister Caleb here up to speed.”

Caduceus hurries out the door, and Yasha and Jester enter— Jester floating, Yasha walking smoothly. Now that he’s seeing her in good light, Caleb can make the outline of hands clasped above the pendulum as though she’s holding it like a sword. “Jester caught me up,” Yasha says.

Jester swoops up to the table and alights next to Beau. “We can fix it now, can’t we? Since we’ve got, _you_ know—” she nods unsubtly to Caleb— “so him and Fjord can—”

Beau nudges her. “Jessie. Don’t. They gotta work it out on their own.”

“What, exactly, do we have to work out?” Caleb asks, finally getting a word in edgewise. “I have no idea why I am here at all. If there is anything you know, it would be a great help. I only want to leave this castle.”

“Don’t we all,” Beau says.

“Look,” Yasha says, “we weren’t sure if we could tell you. You’re a stranger, and this is sort of secret.”

“And now you are telling me?” Caleb asks.

“We don’t have very much of a choice,” Yasha says.

“Plus you’re cursed now, so you’re part of this whether you like it or not,” Beau points out. The candles on her hands and head flare as she sighs sharply. “Okay. Fine. I guess we’re doing this. You saw the eye, right?”

“ _Ja_ , I did.”

Beau nods. “Yeah. That’s what’s cursing us.”

“It’s called Uk’otoa,” Jester says. “It lives in a cave under the castle, and it makes lights on the shoals to trick sailors into landing. But then they crash, and Uk’otoa offers a deal to the captain.”

“Not a good deal,” Beau adds. “It’s worded in Uk’otoa’s favor. It counts on the captain being desperate enough to take any way out.”

“It offers survival for the crew,” Yasha says softly. “In exchange for the captain’s life.”

Caleb stares around at them. “So you are a crew, then?”

“Only me and Beau,” Jester says. “Caduceus and Yasha were just traveling with us.”

“Was Fjord part of the crew?”

All of them exchange a glance. “No,” Beau says. “Fjord was our captain.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Yeah. He’s trapped like us. Still himself, though, cause Uk’otoa needs someone to draw power from.”

“Do you mean that Fjord is powering this curse?” Caleb asks, mind spinning.

“His soul is tied to it,” Beau says. “Uk’otoa uses him to make the spell— you know, the bubble around the castle. If any of us go past the gate, we punch a hole in the bubble, and Uk’otoa starts taking more from Fjord to fill the gap.”

“The windflower shows how much time we have left,” Jester says. “But the petals are falling so fast now.”

The anemone on the pedestal. It had lost a petal as Caleb watched... “What happens when all the petals fall?” He thinks he knows the answer, but he asks anyway, wanting to hear it from these strange, cursed people.

“Uk’otoa claims us,” Yasha says. “All of us. Fjord too. It will make us serve it forever.”

“And that’s your problem too,” Beau says. “Uk’otoa curses anyone who tries to take something from the castle. It’s not using you yet— that probably won’t happen until after Fjord goes. But then it’ll start eating your soul too.”

Caleb nods. His mind has been made up since the previous evening. “I am going to try to break the curse.”

Jester gasps. “You are?!”

“So I need paper,” Caleb continues, “good paper, and good ink. Do you have a library here?”

“Yeah, we do,” Beau says. “A lot of it’s a mess, or encoded, and I haven’t read very much of it. But we have it.”

“Then I will use that,” Caleb says. “Could one of you show me there?”

 

The library is much the same as the rest of the castle: dark walls, a few candle stubs that Beau lights with her hands, floor tiled in blue-gray stone that whispers underfoot. But instead of empty space and dusty furniture, the room is packed with bookshelves that stretch nearly to the ceiling. Caleb rushes for the nearest as soon as he enters the room, just running his hand over the spines. The titles under his fingers are unfamiliar: _A Treatise on Marine Convection Patterns_ , _Moon Over Marquet_ , _Arcane Foci Through the Ages_ , _GNYXF ZNPUVAN_ — that must be one of the encrypted tomes Beau mentioned.

He should be wary. He should be careful. This castle is cursed— but, gods, a _library_...

“They’re not organized,” Beau’s saying, “a bunch aren’t in Common, and a lot of them are about sailing or ocean stuff. We think this castle’s been here for a while— Uk’otoa just took it over. Which is why the books are... what they are.”

“Under its influence, _ja_. All right.” Caleb looks down the room. “Give me a moment.” He casts a quick Detect Magic and wanders down the rows of shelves, picking up anything that sparks against the roiling background of the curse.

Then he sits down on the floor, spreads his haul around him, and gets to work.

At first it’s almost comforting. There is a rhythm to this, familiar and calming, of turning pages, scanning lines, tasting the arcane language on his tongue and feeling the somatic gestures in his grasp. This is what he is good for.

But his focus decays, eventually, in the weird silence of the castle. Nott is somewhere outside, alone on the cliffs. Maybe she got into town and found a place to stay, or maybe she didn’t, or maybe— worse still— she got into town and someone saw her goblin features for what they are.

Caleb submerges himself in the books again, but the fear is there.

He’s deep into _A Layman’s Theory of Abjuration_ when Yasha enters, saying, “Caleb? There’s someone at the gate for you. Nott the Brave? She says she’s coming in if I don’t bring you out.”

Caleb drops the _Layman’s Theory_ and bolts. It was only a refresher; he learned all of it years ago even though he was never much of an abjurer, and he can always come back to it. Nott, on the other hand, is much more fleeting, and infinitely more precious.

He takes the stairs three at a time, near as fast as his knees can take, and skids across the foyer. “Caleb, where are you going?” Jester calls, but he’s already heaving the front door open and dashing through it.

The fastest route through the garden is fixed firmly in his mind, but it still takes him far too long to make it to the gate, where Nott is standing, arms crossed, one foot tapping impatiently. “Nott the Brave!” Caleb calls.

“Caleb!” she shouts back. “Hello!”

Caleb rushes up to the gate and drops to his knees, putting himself at eye level with Nott. “You have no idea how good it is to see you.”

“You too!” she says. “Are you all right? Did you sleep well?”

“No, but that’s nothing— how are _you?_ Did you get into town?”

“I did! All disguised, don’t worry, and I got a room at the inn. I’ve been asking around, trying to find out about the castle. They say there’s a beast living here!”  
“A beast?” Caleb asks. He wouldn’t think he’d missed anything, but the furniture is animated, and they can move disturbingly silently when they want to.

Nott nods firmly, clawed hands clutching the gate. “A beast with green skin and yellow eyes.”

“So— not the eye we saw, then.”

“No, but maybe like it,” Nott says. “Have you seen anything like that?”

Caleb shakes his head. “No. But I will ask the— well, you saw the feather duster? There are more like her. The clock and the candelabrum from the foyer, and the teapot I saw, and the feather duster, are all people cursed to live in this castle.”

“Are you going to be turned into an object too?” Nott asks, alarmed.

“I doubt it. The curse is— ah, on me, not around me. Apparently there is another person in the castle, a Captain Fjord, whose soul is being used to feed the curse. When he dies, I am to take his place.”

“When will he die?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb says. “I did find a flower in the castle. When a petal falls, it means the captain is one step closer to death, apparently.”

“How many petals are left?”

“Three. I saw one fall this morning.”

“You’re not going to die,” Nott says, her reedy voice growing firm. “You aren’t. I’ll figure out what everyone knows about the curse, and you’ll find the magic to break it.”

“ _Ja_ ,” Caleb says, “ _ja_ , we will.”

 

Nott departs eventually, meaning to meet some of the townsfolk at the inn where she’s staying. She promises to return in two days, and Caleb retreats to the library and throws himself back into his work with a fever. Hours later, well into the afternoon, there is a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Caleb calls, keeping his eyes on the page.

Footsteps approach, steady. “Hey. Caleb, right?”

This voice is new, low and honeyed, and Caleb looks up despite himself. There, framed in the doorway, is a sea-green figure with golden eyes— _the beast_ , Nott whispers in his memory— and he scrambles to his feet. “Who are you?”

“Fjord,” the figure says, and steps into the library. In better light, Caleb’s vision resolves into a broad-shouldered half-orc dressed in a plain shirt and vest, and he relaxes. No beast here, only the fears of townsfolk.

Fjord offers his hand. “Sorry I didn’t come to welcome you before. We thought Caduceus would be a friendly face last night, and then, well— you got caught.”

Caleb shakes the proffered hand. Fjord’s grip is firm and warm. “I probably would not have been the most gracious guest last night anyway. So I am glad to meet you now.”

Fjord nods. “You too. Actually, I came to apologize. We should have warned you and your friend better. Uk’otoa’s a greedy fucker.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Right,” Fjord says. Still looks a bit— nervous, maybe. “Is there anything I can do for you while you’re here? There’s a lot of junk in this castle, but it might be useful to you.”

“Enchanted junk? Because that could be quite useful to me.”

“I’ll take a look around. But I did bring you something.” Fjord produces a hand mirror and offers it to Caleb. It’s the size of his hand, and seems to be well-made, though an odd green patina is creeping under the glass.

Caleb accepts it, but doesn’t look in. “And this is...?”

“Enchanted junk,” Fjord says. “It’s a looking glass. Shows you anything you want to see. Yasha told me to pass it along.”

Caleb considers handing it back with some platitude about not wanting to take it from her, but the truth is, he _does_ want the mirror. Badly.

“Excuse me a moment,” he says, and turns a shoulder to Fjord.

“You want to know how to work it?” Fjord asks.

“... _Ja_ , that would be helpful.”

“Just have to tell it what you want to see.”

Caleb peers at the looking glass. It might be cursed, true, but on the other hand... “Show me Nott the Brave,” he tells it, and watches as the patina under the glass begins to foam and swirl, slick as oil. It forms a glossy surface, and slowly, an image forms.

It takes Caleb a moment to place it. The mirror only shows a fragment of the scene, like looking through a telescope. He’s seeing Nott, sitting at a table in a tavern and wearing her usual halfling disguise. As he watches, she lays down a hand of cards and scrapes several silver pieces off the table. Then the patina fades, taking the image with it.

“Can I keep this?” he asks.

“Sure,” Fjord says. “A few days, anyway. Yasha might want it back.”

“ _Danke_.” He pockets it and faces Fjord again. “I do plan to break this curse. I do not know how long it will take me, but— I will try.”

“That’d be mighty welcome,” Fjord says. “We’ve been trying for a while, but none of us have found a way.”

No mention of the anemone, Caleb notices. No mention of the petals falling. Is Fjord trying not to frighten him? Does he want to keep the inexorable ending of the curse to himself, bury the fear deep in his own chest? Caleb finds he can understand that.

“If I can ask,” Fjord adds, “how long have you been studying... this?” He gestures broadly at the books spilled at Caleb’s feet.

“The arcane?” Fjord nods. “On and off. I was very studious in my youth, but, ah, I only returned to it recently.” No need to explain all the details.

“That’s mighty impressive,” Fjord says.

Caleb waves him off. “It is nothing. Anyone could.”

“But no one does,” Fjord points out.

“That is true, I suppose.”

There’s a moment of silence, then, as the candles Beau lit begin to gutter. They’re burning low, and Caleb looks around for another to light.

“Here,” Fjord says, and leans up, plucking a brass-rimmed lantern from the top of a nearby bookshelf. Caleb lights it with the stub of a candle, and the lantern billows to life, filling the space around them with an even glow. The cloudy sky outside the windows is a deep, graying blue, and only as the lantern flares does Caleb realize how dark it had gotten. He knew hours had passed, but didn’t expect sunset quite so soon.

“Does it get dark early here?” he asks Fjord.

“Early? Maybe. It’s always cloudy, though. Haven’t seen the sun since we got here.”

“ _Ja_ , well, I’d expect nothing less from a cursed castle and an eldritch being that wants to eat our souls.”

Fjord chuckles at that. “It does seem pretty thematically appropriate.” He stretches his arms above his head with a groan. “There’s more to see around here, but, uh... well, dinner’s in the kitchen— usually around seven but you can come down any time after. Cad’ll leave you a plate if you don’t show.”

“That would be much appreciated.”

Fjord nods. “I’ll leave you, then.”

Fjord’s gaze lingers just a beat too long— there’s something about it, Caleb thinks, some unsounded depth to the burnished golden glow of those eyes. Then he turns away far too soon, leaving Caleb alone in the library again.

 

He does go down for dinner eventually, some two hours after he was meant to. Voices sound quietly behind the door; Caleb stops and stands in the hallway, listening.

“Think it’ll work?” Beau’s voice.

“It might or it might not.” Caduceus. “But I’m not sure we have much of a choice. None of us have been able to reach any of our gods. And, well, I don’t think Uk’otoa would leave the secret to escaping in the library.”

“Maybe they’ll break the curse, huh?” Beau says. “Fate, or something, right?”

“Fate. Yeah,” Caduceus says, with a certain warmth. “Maybe they will.”

A faint clink, as (Caleb thinks) a candelabrum gets to her feet. “I’m gonna go find Jessie. You know where she went?”

“She’s probably up in the tower.”

“Yeah, all right.”

Caleb startles back from the door as it opens. Beau looks up at him. “Hey. You here for dinner?”

“Ah— _ja_.”           

“Go on in. Cad saved you a plate.”

“ _Danke_.”

Caleb enters the kitchen, letting the door shut behind him. Sure enough, there’s a plate on the little table. Caduceus is next to it, and he looks up as Caleb enters. “Oh, hello there.”

Caleb nods in response and sits to eat.

After a moment, Caduceus says, “You know, Mister Caleb, there’s been some speculation around here lately.”

“ _Ja_ , I suppose so.”

“Jester thinks you’re quite the hero.”

“That is hardly true.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Caduceus says. Caleb peers at him. His expression is— well, hard to read, given he’s made of ceramic and glaze, but seems open. Honest, maybe.

“Who do you think I am, then?” Caleb asks.

Caduceus seems to muse on that for a moment. “I think you’re a traveler. Maybe a little lost, but you know what you’re looking for, and you mean to find it. I think you’ve got a purpose.”

“Well, you are right about that.”

“What I mean to say, Mister Caleb, is that I don’t think it was happenstance that you came here. I believe there is... something you are meant to do.”

There’s an odd intensity to Caduceus’s gaze. Caleb feels a shiver down the back of his neck. He shakes it off. “You are a man of faith, then?”

“I follow the Wildmother.”

“Are you able to feel her here?” Caleb knows the answer— heard Caduceus say it to Beau— but best to play dumb.  
“No,” Caduceus says, and his eyes are very far away. “No. I can’t. The garden is... in stasis. It is not alive, but it is not dead.”

“It is reanimated, then? Undead?”

“No, I would know if it was. Besides, it’s a monoculture— you can’t expect that to grow well.”

“That is a very good point,” Caleb says.

“Honestly, who plants a garden of only one flower? Variety is so much more sustainable. Anyway. I’ll leave you to your dinner,” Caduceus says, and ambles off into the kitchen.

 

Caleb goes back to the library the next morning. Yasha wasn’t lurking outside the door of the room he slept in, which is a bit of comfort. Whether the denizens of the castle trust him now, or whether they simply don’t find him threatening, at least he isn’t directly under watch. He takes the next book from the stack and continues to read.

He’d meant to skim, working over the pages for anything of use, but he finds himself going quickly and slowly in turns— one minute desperate to draw out every single scrap of information, the next, trying to savor every word. It’s heady.

Around noon, the soft whisk of air alerts him to Jester’s presence. She sweeps into the room and peers over his shoulder. “What’re you reading, Caleb?”

“Ah—” He holds up the book, keeping his place marked with one finger. “ _A Devoted History of the Windflower Cliffs_.”

“Have you found anything about breaking the curse?” she asks.

“Not yet. There is no mention of this castle, either. Or Uk’otoa.”

“I’m sure you’ll find it. But,” she says, “I have something to tell you.”

“Oh?”

Jester darts forward to whisper in his ear. “Fjord wants you to meet him in the tower at eight o’clock tonight.”

Caleb gives her a quizzical look. “Why?”

Jester shrugs dramatically. “He just told me to tell you that, that’s all.”

“All right,” Caleb says. He isn’t sure why Fjord would want to meet him alone after they’d already spoken in the library. It might be useful to talk to him again, though— find out whatever details Fjord can give him.

“So you’ll go?” Jester asks.

“ _Ja_ , sure, I will go.”

“Oh, good!” Jester nods and darts back a bit, feathers swishing behind her. “And Caleb?”

“Yes?”

“If you find any... _you_ know—” Jester wiggles her eyebrows dramatically— “let me know, all right?”

Caleb nods solemnly, and finds himself smiling. “I will keep an eye out for smut for you.”

“ _Thank_ you,” she says, and swoops out the door.

They seem good, these people. Strange, certainly, but Caleb is not at all normal himself.

Although he does wonder what Fjord wants to see him for.

 

Eight o’clock comes around. Caleb checks his page number, committing it to memory, before leaving the library. He saw a spiral staircase in the corner of the west wing while exploring the morning before, and he makes for it, guessing that it leads to “the tower”.

The staircase turns in a tight curl, smooth as a snail’s shell. Caleb counts forty-six steps before he emerges onto a round, roofless deck. It’s lined with even crenellations, and he leans between them, staring down over the edge. The castle isn’t terribly tall; even in the dark he can make out the winding shapes of paths through the garden. They swirl in crossing, whorled patterns that seem to bend back on themselves, and after a moment’s staring, he has to look away to clear his eyes.

“Hello? Caleb? You up there?”

It’s Fjord, calling up through the staircase. Caleb turns, placing his back to a crenellation. “Yes, hello,” he calls back.

Fjord appears on the stairs and climbs up onto the deck. He comes to stand beside Caleb, looking past the garden to the jagged line where the cliffs fall away. The sea is iron-dark and seething.

“It’s a good view from up here,” Caleb says eventually.

Fjord shakes himself slightly, seems to awake from whatever trance the sea held him in. “That it is.”

“Your friends told me you were a captain.”

A slight smile crosses Fjord’s face, more chagrinned than pleased. “I was. And a pretty good job I did of it, huh?”

“This is old magic. Strong, more than arcane. I doubt that you could have done any different.”

Fjord looks down for a moment. When he looks up again, his expression is clearer, and he turns fully to face Caleb, leaning sideways on the crenellated wall. “So what’d you want to talk to me about?”

“What did I—? You asked me up here.”

“No, you asked me. Beau... dammit. Beau told me.” Fjord sighs. “I’m guessing Jester told you I wanted to meet you up here?”

“She did, _ja_. Have we been set up?”

“Yup,” Fjord says. “They’re, ah— well. Yeah, they’re trying to set us up.”

“And why are they doing that?” Caleb asks. He has an inkling of the answer, but he wants to be sure.

“Because,” Fjord says, with a very tired expression, “they think true love’s kiss will break the curse. Specifically, gotta be me and my true love— else Beau and Jester would’ve done it by now.”

It’s both better and worse than Caleb expected, to hear that said aloud. He’s already trapped in an enchanted castle full of animated objects— why not end a curse with the touch of a lover’s lips?

“So yeah,” Fjord’s saying, “they set us up. Can’t blame them, really. We all want out of here.”

“No wonder,” Caleb agrees.

“Anyway,” Fjord says, “I’ll go down. Let you have the tower. It’s a good view.”

Caleb shakes his head. “I had some questions for you, actually.”

“Oh? Well, I can certainly provide you with some answers,” Fjord says, his voice pitching formal for a moment.

“Would you tell me about the curse?”

“The curse? I suppose I can do that.”

“When you were cursed, specifically. Caduceus mentioned that Uk’otoa lures ships in like a lighthouse.”

“Yeah,” Fjord says. “Yeah, it does.” He looks out to sea again— far, far out, past the breaking waves to the horizon, lost in darkness and sheets of fog. “Our ship was the _Tide’s Breath_ , out of Port Damali. It was handed down to me from my old captain, Vandren, when he retired. Beau and Jester hired on in Nicodranas, both of them running from one thing or another—not my business to say, but you can ask them. Had a crew of ten more besides them, too. Good people,” Fjord says, and the bleakness in his voice makes Caleb think of the too-bright seams of his own mind.

“I am sorry for your loss,” he says.

Fjord nods acknowledgement, continues. “We picked up Caduceus and Yasha down on the coast. Cad was out looking for something for his family— he comes from way up north. Yasha was trying to get back to a friend of hers who runs with a traveling carnival.”

“Was Yasha in the carnival?”

“Nah, I think she was the bouncer.”

“That makes sense.”

“Yeah, no kidding. So they were with us when we passed the cliffs.” Fjord pauses for a long moment. When he speaks again, his voice is measured and slow. “We hit a storm. All rights, should not have been there, but it was. We couldn’t outrun it, couldn’t get past it. Couldn’t see father than my own face once we were in it.” Fjord falls silent.

“And then?” Caleb asks.

“And then I was falling,” Fjord says. “The ship blew apart under my feet. I went down so fast I didn’t have time to take a breath. Couldn’t find the surface either. Blew bubbles, but they just floated. And then I saw that light, out there in the dark. So I swam for it.” His hands are clawlike where they grip the crenellations. “And then Uk’otoa was there. It offered me a way out, my life for my crew’s— the ones who’d survived the wreck, anyway. And I agreed.”

“As simple as that,” Caleb murmurs.

Fjord nods. “Yeah. As simple as that.” He turns to Caleb, yellow eyes bright as searchlights. “Is that what you needed?”

“I believe so. Yes.”

“All right.” Another, longer glance. “Can I ask what brought you here?”

“It’s only fair, I suppose. My friend and I, we were looking for a place to spend the night. We only meant to take shelter. My friend picked a flower. It wasn’t her fault,” he says, needing Fjord to understand. “I would have done the same had there been, ah— arrowroot, or witch hazel. We have been... very desperate. For a very long time. But it was anemones. Windflowers.”

“And you took the credit for it?”

“I took the flower and pushed her out of the garden,” Caleb says. “I— I’ve been checking on her. With the mirror.”

“That’s awfully brave of you,” Fjord says.

Caleb shakes his head. “We will agree to disagree.”

“Sure. Agree to disagree.” Fjord stretches, sighs. “Noticed you weren’t at dinner.”

“Ah— no. I was not.”

“You want to come down? Cad left you a plate again.”

“You go,” Caleb says. “I will be down in a moment.”

“All right.” Fjord turns, starts for the stairs. He stops one step down. Looks back. Seems to think of saying something, and then keeps his peace, and goes down into the castle.

Caleb remains.

Fjord is— he doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t know.

Caleb turns from the rampart and follows Fjord down.

 

 

_III. come to the window_

 

The next morning, Caleb goes to the library again and settles in to keep reading. He could get used to this, he thinks. He hasn’t gotten to really enjoy a library like this since those few days two winters ago, when he and Nott broke into a library to get out of a blizzard, and they were more concerned with not starving to death back then. But now he has time. Bitterly earned, true, but still: he has time.

He’s flipping through one of the ciphered books, this one entitled _UNAQOBBXRE URYCRE_ , when Jester darts through the door. “Caleb! Your friend’s coming to the gate!”

“Thank you, Jester!” Caleb calls back. He puts _UNAQOBBXRE URYCRE_ down on the stack of dead-end books— it contains multiple bizarre charts and diagrams, but none arcane— and runs out of the library, down the stairs, and through the garden quickly enough to meet Nott just as she arrives. “Nott the Brave! How are you?” he asks as he kneels down, still catching his breath.

“I’m good!” Nott says. “But I’ve got news, listen— I was asking around in town, looking for answers, you know, and they say there’s a way to break the curse.”

“What?” Caleb asks, hardly daring to hope.

“True love’s kiss.”

Caleb rests his forehead against the gate with a sigh. “You are actually not the first to suggest that.”

“ _Really?_ Wait— have you been talking to the other people?” Nott pauses. “People? Items?”

“People,” Caleb confirms. “The feather duster is named Jester, the candelabrum is Beau, the teapot is Caduceus, and the tall-case clock is Yasha.”

“Are you going to fall in love with one of them?”

“No. I believe Beau and Jester are already in a relationship, as a matter of fact.”

Nott shakes her head. “Your prospects are not looking good, Caleb.”         

“That’s— there is no chance of that, Nott. I am just here to break the curse, and not by kissing anyone. That isn’t how curses work.”

“Well, just keep true love’s kiss in mind, all right?”

“Have you heard anything else?” Caleb asks, rather than agree.

“Nothing useful so far,” Nott says. “They do have all sorts of stories about the castle. Most of them don’t agree, although they do all talk about the beast.”

“There is no beast,” Caleb says. “Unless you count Uk’otoa— the eye we saw.”

“The beast with green skin and golden eyes?” Nott prompts.

“Oh. That would be Fjord.”

“Is he a beast?”

“No.”

“He might be.”

“He isn’t,” Caleb says.

Nott shrugs. “Well, if you’re sure. Anyway, they say a beast lives in the castle— so I guess that’s Fjord— but it’s actually a hero under a spell, and to be freed from the curse, he has to be kissed by his true love. So you know, it sort of sounds like you’re the true love in this scenario.”

“All right, all right, fine,” Caleb sighs, and Nott just laughs.

 

Jester appears in the library at seven o’clock that evening, swooping low over the stacks of books. “Caleb!” she calls. “Dinner!”  
“I will be down...”

“No, you have to come now. This is crew dinner, Caleb! We all sit together. That includes you.”

Caleb sighs and closes his book. “ _Ja_ , okay. I’ll come.”

“You’d better!” Jester says, and darts out of the room, leaving a puff of blue feathers in her wake.

Caleb thinks about going back to reading, but he finally sets his book aside and leaves the library. As he approaches the kitchen, he hears conversation: Caduceus’s low tones, Beau’s gruff rejoinders, Jester replying cheerfully, even a soft remark from Yasha. And Fjord’s voice, smooth and honeyed.

He pushes the door open and enters.

“And there’s bread on the— oh, hello there, Mister Caleb!” Caduceus says, beaming.

“See, I told you he was coming,” Jester says, nudging Beau.

“Hello,” Fjord says, raising a hand in greeting.

Caleb waves awkwardly. “Hello.” He takes the open chair, which is set across from Fjord at the table. Beau, Jester, and Caduceus, whose object forms are too small for chairs, are sitting on top of the table, and Yasha is standing. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Of course!” Jester says. “You live here, so you’re one of us.”

“Shared meals are important,” Caduceus agrees.

Caleb nods. “It is appreciated. Ah— is there a topic of discussion? Anything in particular?”

“Most of us can’t actually eat,” Beau says, “so we just hang out. Chat. That kinda thing.”

“Go ahead and serve yourself,” Caduceus adds. “Bread’s cooling on the counter.”

As Caleb puts smoked ham and parsnips on his plate, Jester asks, “So how was everyone’s day? I repainted the mural on Yasha’s ceiling, to make the stars match.”

“I helped Jester paint my ceiling,” Yasha says. “Thank you, Jester. It’s nice to have the right constellations.”

“Do you change it every season?” Caleb asks.

“Yep!” Jester says. “So it’s it sort of what you’d see if you were actually outside, because the clouds never go away. There’s a celestial globe that we use to make sure it’s right.”

“I started a new keg of mead,” Caduceus says. “This one should be a little better.”

“Always happy to taste test,” Fjord assures him, with only the slightest grimace. He turns to Caleb. “Caduceus has a new project. He’s been trying to ferment mead.”

“And you’re the only person who can try it for me,” Caduceus points out.

“Yeah, I’d be all over that if I could,” Beau agrees.

Caduceus adds, “Also, I’m not entirely sure why you like mead, but I do enjoy yeast.”

“He talks to the yeast,” Yasha tells Caleb.

“It makes it ferment better!” Jester says, and Caduceus nods his agreement. “But Fjord and Beau and Caleb, what did you do today?”

“Tried to meditate,” Beau says. “Went fine. I think it’s getting easier to stay in one position, now that I’m made of metal. Don’t know if that’s bad or not. Fjord, your turn.”

“Nothing much,” Fjord says. “Recalibrated the armillary sphere. Darned some socks. Played a little solitaire.”

“You wanna play chess again sometime?” Beau asks.

Fjord pauses, then sighs. “Maybe. But you’re just gonna beat me.”

“Yeah, but it’s more fun than beating any of these losers,” Beau says, gesturing at Jester, Caduceus, and Yasha with an undeniable fondness.

“You can’t beat me that easily,” Jester chirps, elbowing Beau. “I am _very_ good at chess.”

“Yeah, you are,” Beau agrees, putting an arm around her shoulders, “but you play by way different rules and I can’t keep track of them.”

“Having only one set of rules is boring, though.”

Beau seems about to contest that, but deflates. “Chess does get kinda boring after a while, I guess— anyway, Caleb, what’d you do today? You have to talk about it. Dinner rule.”

Caleb wipes his mouth with his napkin. “I read some more. And I have a question, actually. Has anyone ever tried to decipher the encrypted books?”

Shaking heads from most of the table. Beau says, “I tried, back when we first got here, but I kept getting halfway and then it would fall apart.”

“All right. No matter, then. I mean to try at some point, but there is plenty of reading material that is actually legible. It will probably take me months to get through it all, even just skimming.”

Fjord glances up. “Could you use another set of eyes on it?”

“It would make it go faster,” Caleb agrees, and then realizes what Fjord actually asked. “Why, do you want to help?”

“If it’d be any use,” Fjord says. “I don’t have any knowledge about magic.”

“There is plenty to read.”

Fjord nods. “All right. I’ll meet you in... the library? Any time in particular?”

“I am always there, so any time will do,” Caleb says.

“I’ll see you there, then,” Fjord says, and smiles. It’s a true, honest smile, and Caleb finds himself smiling back.

“ _Oooooooh_ ,” Jester whispers.

“Shh,” Beau whispers.

“Why are we whispering?” Caduceus whispers.

“I don’t know either,” Yasha says, at the exact same volume.

Fjord levels an exasperated stare at them. “Come on, guys. A little professionalism.”

“You think professionalism literally ever applied to us?” Beau asks.

“Also, Cad and I aren’t part of your crew, so you can’t order us around,” Yasha adds.

“And didn’t we hire you?” Caduceus muses. “So that would make us your boss.”

Fjord just sighs.

              

In the morning, Caleb goes down to the library as soon as he wakes up. He isn’t sure when Fjord will visit, so he simply sits down to read.

Shortly after nine, he’s broken out of his reverie by the rap of knuckles on the doorframe. He looks up to see Fjord standing in the doorway, holding a cloth napkin parcel in one hand. “Morning,” he says, waving. “Caduceus said you didn’t come for breakfast, so I brought you something.” He holds up the parcel.

“Oh. Ah— thank you,” Caleb says. He gets up, setting his book aside, and goes to meet Fjord halfway. Fjord places the parcel in Caleb’s outstretched hand, and he unwraps the napkin, revealing a steaming corn muffin. “Thank you,” he says again, unsure how else to respond.

“Think nothing of it,” Fjord says. He looks around the library, gaze landing on the various stacks of read and discarded books that have begun to dot the floor. “So, uh— how can I help?”

Caleb points at a nearby shelf. “I have very little nautical knowledge, but those books seem to be about the sea in this area. If there are any peculiarities, anything out of the ordinary, I would like to know.”

Fjord nods. “I’ll get right on that.”

Caleb returns to his chair and his book, but glances up at Fjord every so often. Fjord has taken a stack of books to a nearby seat, and he’s starting into one.

He looks up again, and Fjord’s tongue is poking out a little as he peers at the book in his hands. Fjord gets up and goes to the leaded window, holding the book up into the thin daylight to get a better look. He leans his shoulder against the window, tilting his chin as he tries to make out whatever’s on the page. The tip of his tongue is still sticking out of his mouth.

Caleb reaches into his sleeve and fingers the phosphor match that resides there. A globe of light flares above Fjord’s head, and he looks up, startled, and then across at Caleb, a smile blooming on his face. “That’s a nifty trick,” he says quietly.

“A cantrip,” Caleb says. “Will you need it for long? I can keep casting it.”

Fjord looks back down at the book. “No, I’ve made it out now. Just a little faded. But thank you.” He returns to his seat; Caleb lets his light wink out and goes back to reading.

He looks up at the leaded window some time later, and traces the diamond panes of light that fall across the floor, nearly but not quite stretching to Fjord’s seat.

 

That evening, Fjord departs the library at seven to get dinner, and Caleb waves him off with assurances that he’ll be down in a moment, just has to finish this chapter.

Fjord reappears an hour later, on his way to play chess with Beau, with a message from Caduceus that Caleb really should come down for dinner, even if he has to stop in the middle. It’s poor timing; Caleb is several pages into chapter nine, and he doesn’t need dinner, but... Fjord is asking. So he goes.

Caduceus and Jester are in the kitchen, chatting over a cup of tea. The cup has been placed on a small brazier, and it’s steaming heavily and letting off a strong smell of apple blossoms. Caleb guesses it’s a workaround for the fact that neither of them can drink tea.

Both look up when he enters. “Hello, Caleb!” Jester says. “Did Fjord find you?”

“Ah, _ja_ , he sent me down.”

“Your plate is on the stovetop,” Caduceus says. “We kept it warm for you.”

“Thank you,” Caleb says. “And, ah— I apologize for my lateness.”

Caduceus’s expression seems to soften a bit, though it might be steam drifting past his painted features. “That’s all right.”

Caleb hadn’t really meant to apologize, but he’d been formally invited to dinner the night before, and now he’s been expected again. At this point, it seems ruder not to acknowledge. He takes the plate from the stovetop and, after a moment’s hesitation, sits at the table with Caduceus and Jester.

“So how has your reading been?” Jester asks. “With Fjord?”

“It has been going... well,” Caleb says, which is only true from a certain angle. “Fjord has been reading the nautical texts.”

“Do you have a plan to break the curse?”

“Not yet. But soon, maybe. I am still trying to find out what exactly it is. What sort of rules it obeys. If it is arcane or divine, for instance.”

“Well, you know Uk’otoa set it, don’t you?” Caduceus says. “There was a bargain Fjord agreed to.”

“It isn’t a warlock pact,” Caleb says. “Fjord hasn’t gained anything from it. Although I suppose it could be an infernal pact, if Uk’otoa was that kind of creature, but it doesn’t seem to be. It’s unlike anything I have ever read of.”

“Then maybe you need a different kind of solution,” Jester suggests. “Not a spell or, you know, a ritual or something.”

Caduceus nods. “She has a point.”

“There isn’t much else I can do,” Caleb says. “I am an arcane spellcaster. Studying and deciphering things is my wheelhouse.”

Jester’s expression, he realizes much too late, is verging on wicked. She says, “There are things you wouldn’t need magic for.”

“I feel like I am going to regret this,” Caleb says, “but... what do you mean?”

“True love’s kiss!” Jester says. “That’s how you break a curse. Obviously. Didn’t you ever read any fairy tales?”

“Yes, I read fairy tales, and romance is all well and good, but that is not really how magic works.”

“It’s sort of how ours works,” Caduceus says. “When it comes from the Wildmother, or Jester and the Traveler. You have to believe that they will help you.”

“The gods.”

“Yes,” Caduceus says, with a smile so calm and certain that Caleb nearly believes him.

“You must forgive me— I am not as well versed in the divine arts. But that still requires magical skill, doesn’t it?”

“I think the Traveler can sort of teach anyone,” Jester says. “And Caduceus has a really good point, you know. The Traveler taught me some spells that only work when I’m angry. You’ve got to mean it.”

“I am not a cleric or a paladin,” Caleb says, perhaps sharply. “That is not how magic works for me. And it is not how magic works in general. There are ways— there are rules for this...” His voice trails off. “You don’t see, do you. That is fine. I will devise a way to break the curse, and it will not depend on my being in love with Fjord.”

Jester frowns. “Well, all right then. I guess you don’t have to bother caring about anything if you don’t want to.” She flutters up off the table, saying, “See you whenever you decide to come to dinner,” and swoops out of the room in a puff of blue feathers.

Caleb stares after her for a moment, then looks back at Caduceus. The teapot meets his gaze calmly.

“Do you think she’s right?” Caleb asks.

“I don’t think it’s out of the question,” Caduceus says. “And I do think you should keep it in mind.” He hops off the table and heads toward the door. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold,” he says, and then vanishes around the corner.

Caleb eats for several minutes, though his appetite is gone, and washes his plate carefully in the sink. The teacup is still steaming when he leaves the kitchen, and the scent of apple blossoms lingers sweetly in the air.

 

In the morning, before Fjord even arrives, Yasha appears in the doorway of the library. “Hello?”

Caleb looks up from his book. “Yes, come in.”

Yasha enters, her pale wooden feet gliding smoothly over the floor. “Fjord gave you the looking glass from me, didn’t he?”

“Oh. _Ja_. Do you want it back?”

“No, not really. I just want to borrow it.”

“Of course,” Caleb says. He takes the silver hand mirror from the side table and holds it out to Yasha, and she takes it gently from his hands. He’s been keeping the looking glass in the library, on the side table where napkins, teacups, and the most promising texts have begun to accumulate. The library has felt more secure, lately, than the bedroom he’s been sleeping in. Or maybe just more familiar.

Yasha tells the looking glass, “I would like to see Mollymauk Tealeaf.” Caleb can’t see the face of the mirror from his seat, but a smile blooms across Yasha’s face, and she watches the looking glass intently for a long minute. When the spell fades, she offers the looking glass back to him. “Thank you.”

“It is yours, really,” Caleb says. “So you are welcome to it.” He puts the looking glass back on the side table. “Ah— if I may ask— who are you scrying on?”

“Molly’s a friend of mine,” Yasha says. “We’re in a circus together. He tells fortunes, I’m the muscle. He knows that I have to go and spend some time traveling, sometimes...” She trails off.

“But never this long before,” Caleb guesses.

“No,” Yasha says.

“I am sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault.” Yasha shrugs slightly. “Who do you use it to look at?”

“The person I came here with,” Caleb says. “Nott the Brave. She is staying down in the village— actually, she told me to expect her today.”

“That’s good, that you can see her,” Yasha says. “For real, I mean. In person. It’s good that she stayed.”

“She is a good friend,” Caleb agrees. “And your Mollymauk— he will expect you back.”

Yasha nods. “I hope so.”

She departs, and Caleb stays in the library, keeping careful track of the time. Nott had said she’d come back in the morning, but it’s a long walk by the path that trickles through the rolling clifftops. She might arrive later in the day, especially if she was up gambling again the night before.

Around nine, Fjord enters, offering him a sticky bun wrapped in a napkin. “Morning, Caleb. Yasha says your friend’s coming up the path.”

“Thank you,” Caleb says, and dashes out of the library. He passes Yasha in the entry hall, waves to her, and runs down through the garden quickly enough that he reaches the gate well before Nott does.

“Hello, Caleb,” she calls as she crests the last hill. “Did you break the curse yet?”

“No,” he calls back. “I am still reading. There are probably a thousand books in the library. Two thousand.”

Nott comes to a stop in front of the gate. “Well, do you have a plan?”

“There are some possibilities,” Caleb says. “I still need to figure out how it works, to be honest. Do you have any ideas?”

“I’ve been trying to find out more about Uk’otoa,” she says. “The locals don’t know anything about that name, but they do know lots about a light on the cliffs that looks like a lighthouse. They say ships have been crashing on the cliffs for as long as the castle’s been here.”

“Has anyone ever seen it and escaped?” Caleb asks.

“Well, probably,” Nott says, “since there are stories about it. I don’t know who it would be, though. Maybe not anyone alive. It’s sort of just a ghost story, you know?”

“That makes sense.”

“The beast is definitely something people have seen, though. They say kids used to dare each other to go in, and one time— I think about two years ago— they saw the beast in the castle, and they haven’t gone back since.”

“Probably wise,” Caleb says.

“But they’ve got even more different fairy tales,” Nott continues. “Someone gets exiled and they live there, or they have to go and sleep next to the beast every night, or they were born there and never left. Or they got married to the beast and then they found dead bodies in the basement. It sort of sounds like they just tell the same stories we know, only about the castle. Unless you’ve found any corpses in the basement?”

“No,” Caleb says.

“So maybe this is nothing, then, but all those stories say there are two ways to break the curse. And true love’s kiss is one of them!”

“What is the other?”

Nott shrugs. “It’s death.”

“Ah.” Caleb pauses. “Whose death?”       

“The beast’s, usually,” Nott says. “Sometimes it’s also the other person trapped in the castle who dies. But it’s only some of the stories, not nearly as many as the true love’s kiss ones, so probably the answer is true love’s kiss and not death.”

Caleb takes this in. “All right. Assuming the beast is meant to be Fjord, I don’t think death or kissing is on the table.”

“Are you sure?” Nott asks. “Kissing, not death.”

“I am fairly sure,” Caleb says. “What else have you been doing in town?”

They talk for a while about Nott’s exploits in the seaside town, and Caleb relates a few anecdotes from his time in the castle. He leaves out his discussion with Jester and Caduceus, but mentions that Fjord has started helping him in the library. Eventually, Nott has to set off back to town.

“You have to keep reading and studying,” she says. “I can’t figure it out all on my own.”

“You don’t have to,” Caleb says. “I mean to break the curse. And— if you need to leave, Nott, you can. You should.”

“Well, I won’t,” Nott says, and the firmness with which she says it makes Caleb smile, though guilt still clutches at him. “I need you. You know that. And anyway, this is what friends do.” She waves, and then she starts off down the path.

“See you in two days!” she calls, and then she’s gone.

Caleb stands at the gate and watches for a long while as her form appears and disappears between the hills, and finally vanishes entirely.

 

The next morning, Caleb decides to try a different tack. He pulls down every encrypted tome he can find and stacks them all together on a table in the middle of the library. _GNYXF ZNPUVAN_ and _UNAQOBBXRE URYCRE_ , among many others, glare up at him, stubbornly illegible. Caleb goes through the stack and writes down every title. Then he begins to compare letter frequencies, word lengths, and even typefaces.

But by the time Fjord has arrived in the library, he hasn’t made any progress. Every time he thinks he’s decrypted part of a title, the rest of it turns out to be gibberish. There might be multiple ciphers at work, but how are they chosen? He takes a bite of the bread roll at his elbow— Fjord, now sitting in an armchair across the room, must have left it— and dives back in.

“ _ZNZR QEBC_ ,” Fjord reads over his shoulder, making a valiant attempt at the nearly vowel-less words.

Caleb blinks and looks up at Fjord. “I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean.”

Fjord studies the book for a moment longer and finally shakes his head. “Neither do I. How long have you been at this?”

“Six hours and twenty-seven minutes,” Caleb says automatically.

“That long?” Fjord exclaims. “C’mon, we’re getting you out of here. You need some fresh air. A walkabout.”

“Fjord,” Caleb protests, “I am fine, this is nothing—”

Fjord grabs his hand and pulls him out of his seat. “Take a break at least. Your back’s gotta be shot.”

Caleb rolls his shoulders experimentally. His spine emits a series of disturbingly loud pops and crackles.

“Yeah,” Fjord says. “See.”

Caleb sighs. “Fine.”

“Good.” Fjord lets go of his hand and heads for the door of the library. Caleb trails after him, and as they step out into the hallway and toward the stairs, Fjord says, “Have you ever seen the attic in the east wing?”

“I didn’t know there was an attic in the east wing.”

“We’ve found a lot of weird stuff in there. That’s where Yasha got the looking glass from.”

“There are magical items in this attic?” They’re probably all cursed, but Caleb can work with that.

Fjord shrugs. “Some. Or maybe all— we just haven’t figured out a way to work them yet.”

“Where is this attic?”

They’ve made it up the stairs to the east wing. Fjord points up at the ceiling, where a trapdoor is faintly visible. “There.” Fjord leans up on his toes and plucks at the string dangling from the trapdoor; with a yank, the door opens, and a rope ladder tumbles down. He places his foot on the bottom rung, steadying it. “Go on up.”

“Ah— thank you.” Caleb climbs the ladder as quickly as he can, casting a string of Dancing Lights above his head as he does.

The most noticeable feature of the attic in the east wing, right off the bat, is that it is a mess. All manner of knick-knacks and accoutrement are piled atop each other on every side, and most are covered in a thick layer of dust. There are armoires and end tables, pots and glasses, silk robes and spinning wheels. Caleb steps aside, letting Fjord climb up, and casts Detect Magic.

The attic explodes with light.

His shock must show on his face; Fjord says, “Caleb?”

“It’s— well—” Caleb shakes himself and turns to face Fjord. “I would be surprised if there was an object in here that was not magical.”

Fjord’s eyebrows shoot up. “Well, you’re welcome to pick through it. Not as though we’re using it.”

“Thank you,” Caleb says, as sincere as he has ever been in his life, and plunges into the nearest pile.

He’s looking for books, really. Amulets would likely do as well, since they’re popular vessels for curse-breaking enchantments, but he wants books. And maybe it’s luck, or maybe it’s Uk’otoa’s touch, but his hands land on a worn, gilded cover moments into his search. Caleb tugs the book free from the footstool it had been pinned beneath and brushes it off, peering at the cover. There’s no title, only a delicate filigree inlay, which is promising— the most powerful texts don’t declare themselves. Under Detect Magic, its arcane source appears to be illusory.

“What’ve you got there?” Fjord asks.

“I am not quite sure,” Caleb says, inspecting the book. “Give me— ah, ten minutes.” He closes the trapdoor, creating a small clearing, and begins to draw the ritual circle for Identify.

Ten minutes later, the circle fades, and Caleb finds himself comprehending the nature of the book. Or, rather, not comprehending it. All he can gather is that it can create powerful illusions based on the viewer’s desire. Beyond that, he has no idea.

He relays this to Fjord, who thinks on it for a moment before saying, “Well— an illusion can’t really hurt us, can it?”

“I suppose not,” Caleb agrees, already warming to the idea.

“So there’s no harm in taking it for a little spin.”

“No, there shouldn’t be.” Caleb gets to his feet beside Fjord. “All right. I will try to make an illusion.”

He opens the book, and the attic dissolves.

In its place, four walls and a roof come into view, lit by low, warm sunlight. Dust motes float in the air around them. Linen curtains flutter against the open windows. The hearth is cold, but laid with narrow pine logs that will crackle and pop when lit. A pail of fresh raspberries sits on the crook-legged table. Outside the window, the sky is blue, so blue it makes Caleb want to cry.

He is already crying, he realizes, and ducks his head, wiping tears from his cheeks.

Beside him, Fjord asks, “Is everything all right?”

Caleb composes himself. “This, ah— the book creates an illusion according to the viewer’s desire.” He bows his shoulders inward, trying to hold himself together. “I believe I underestimated its power.”

“In what way?”

“It isn’t a desire, a choice. It is your desire— your heart’s desire.” The book still rests in his hands; he thumbs at the pages, watches dust rising golden fwith the updraft.

Fjord turns in a slow circle, taking the cottage in. “So this is yours?”

“Mine, _ja_.” Caleb forces himself to look around, taking in more detail. “It is just how I remember it.”

“Your home?”

“Once. _Ja_.”

Fjord is watching him with an odd, guarded expression. “Why once?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it not your home anymore?”  
Caleb forces himself to remain in the moment, ignoring the strange tingling sensation of the book in his hands as it pries into the deepest, dearest parts of himself. “No. It... is not.”

“Caleb,” Fjord says, and then, “ _Caleb!_ ”

Caleb looks down.

The tingling sensation, it appears, is not the illusion taking hold. It is fire, bright and hot, leaping upward from his palms. And the fire spreads, catching on the bare floorboards beneath his feet. The hearth ignites, and the curtains singe in the heat. Light floods through the windows, but the sun is long gone: there is nothing but fire.

Someone is shouting, near him, a deep voice. Caleb can only comprehend the crackling as the flames crawl higher, higher, licking at the ceiling.

And then, all too near, the screams...

He recalls those voices intimately, despite the smoke that clouds everything after in his mind. His mother and his father, in the final moments of their lives. His mother and his father, who he killed.

He remembers everything.

There are hands on his, batting at the flames, tugging on the book. He clutches it despite the searing heat, but it begins to slip, and as it does another voice rises in the distance, young and inhuman with grief— nearly unrecognizable, but his memory is perfect, and that is the scream that ripped from his throat on that night; the book falls from his grasp—

and then everything is dark and he is weightless and spinning, his clothes drag at him, his chest fills with water when he tries to breathe. He feels his body spasm, grasping for a surface he cannot see, though this cool dark world is so unlike fire that part of him wants to stop here for a while.

Hands grip his shoulders, shaky but sure, and then everything falls away.

There is no light, but he can feel wood beneath his knees, taste blood on his tongue. He must have bitten it, he thinks, with the part of his mind that can comprehend _here_ and _there_ as separate things. Here is the wood, the blood, the attic room. There is the best of his life. And the worst.

“Caleb?”

An unfamiliar voice. Clipped, more nasal. But a familiar timbre. Fjord.

“Caleb. You’re on the trapdoor. I can’t open it. There’s no light.” A shaky breath. “Caleb, move, I can’t—”

He raises his hands and casts Dancing Lights. Fjord is very near him, his hands on Caleb’s shoulders, the book lying facedown between them. “Thanks,” he says, exhaling slowly, as if to prove to himself that he can. His voice is that low honeyed drawl again, Caleb observes, a bit distantly.

“It is nothing.”

“Are you all right?” Fjord asks. He frowns, perhaps recognizing that the question is unfair.

“ _Ja_ ,” Caleb says anyway. “I— I think so. Are you?”

“Fine and dandy,” Fjord says.

“Good.” Caleb digs his fingers into the wood of the trapdoor. “I am sorry. You should not have had to see that.”

“See what?”

“The fire. My— my home.”

Fjord laughs a little, and it’s strangely raw; Caleb looks at him more closely and makes out twin tear tracks on his cheeks. “Unless I’m much mistaken, Caleb, we both saw the worst that ever happened to us in there. And you never even got to see the good parts of mine. I think there’s apology both ways.”

Caleb shakes his head. “I should have controlled myself. I should have known the illusion would feed off my memories— I should have known there was something worse.” He meets Fjord’s eyes. “I should not have brought you with me.”

Fjord’s gaze remains fixed on Caleb; his grip is tight as anchor chain, as though he cannot remember how to let go. “Can we discuss this... not here?”

“Oh. Of course.”

Caleb gets up and steps off the trapdoor. He picks up the book and, after a moment’s hesitation, places it within arm’s reach atop a leaning pile of birdcages. Fjord opens the door, flooding the attic with dim light. The rope ladder unfurls. When they descend, the hallway seems a fortune of air.

Fjord closes the trapdoor. They begin to walk, past empty bedrooms and down the stairs, until they stand in the hall above the foyer, beneath the vaulted ceiling and bathed in thin light from the massive window above them.

“I should explain,” Caleb says.

“You can probably guess mine,” Fjord says, dry.

“The book found the best part of my life,” Caleb says. “And then the worst part.”

“Both at your home.”

“ _Ja_.”

“You caught on fire, Caleb. There was screaming— I didn’t know what to do.” There is still a wildness behind Fjord’s eyes. “I tried to grab the book from you, but you wouldn’t let it go.”

“No, you did right. The book was the source of the illusion.” Caleb pauses. “Out of curiosity, what were you trying to create?”

“Water. I wanted water,” Fjord says. “To put the fire out.”

“That was the shipwreck. Here.”

“Yeah,” Fjord says. “Yeah, it was.” He rubs a hand over his face. “Went right to the worst moment of my life. Just like yours. I would’ve tried to get out right there, but you sank way down and I didn’t know if you would come back with me. So I grabbed onto you, and then I just... wished us back. And it ended.”

“Everything here is cursed,” Caleb says.

“It absolutely is,” Fjord agrees.

“And we probably should never touch any of it again.”

“We’re on the same page there.”

Caleb nods. “Good. Well. I am going back to the library, I think. This has been a very effective distraction, Fjord.”

Fjord laughs. “Yeah, sorry about that.” His expression sobers. “I’ll be going up to the tower, maybe. Try and get a view.”

“All right.” Caleb starts up the stairs. He’s several steps up when Fjord speaks again.            

“Caleb—”

“Yes?”

“Will you tell me, sometime? Why you went there?”

Caleb stands very still, one foot poised to continue up the stairs. “Will you tell me about yourself?”  
“Sometime,” Fjord says. “When we both know what to say. Not now.”

“No. Not now.” Caleb hesitates. “But... sometime. _Ja_.”

“Right. Good talk,” Fjord says.

“Good talk,” Caleb agrees, and goes upstairs to the library, where he reads very little, and only pets his cat, over and over, for a very long time.

 

 

_IV. sweet is the night-air_

 

The next morning, Caleb goes down to the garden instead of the library. He sits down on the path, between beds of anemones, and spends ten minutes casting Detect Magic to remind himself of the position of the bubble surrounding Windflower Castle. It exactly encompasses the garden and arcs  just high enough to cover the tower in the west wing. Tidy work. Conserves energy.

Caleb casts a Fire Bolt at it.

The spell bursts against the invisible barrier of the bubble, fading harmlessly into the air. Caleb’s Detect Magic shows absolutely no change.

So maybe he’s just wasting spells. Or maybe he’s feeding energy to Uk’otoa. Or maybe he’s slowly weakening the curse.

Caleb digs his diamond focus out of his pocket and spins it between his hands. Might as well try every option.

Fjord approaches from the castle some time later, after Caleb has finished cycling through every possible type of damage Chromatic Orb can produce and returned to Fire Bolt to conserve his spells. “What’s going on out here?”

“I thought I’d try something new today,” Caleb says.         

“Just battering through it?”

“Testing its vulnerabilities. _Ja_.”

Fjord sits down next to him and hands him a thick heel of bread wrapped in a napkin. “What’ve you tried?”

“Well, there is Fire Bolt.” Caleb casts it again, pitching the ball of flame in a high arc so Fjord has time to watch it. “Evocation cantrip. Very simple. Then Chromatic Orb—” He takes his diamond, spins it, and launches a blast of lightning toward the bubble along the same path. “It is a more complex spell. It requires a focus.” He holds up the diamond.

Fjord leans in, peering at it closely but not making any move to touch. “That’s amazing. How did you learn to do all that?”

“I taught myself,” Caleb says. It’s true, after a fashion— he has been teaching himself these past few years.

“I know I’ve said it before,” Fjord says, “but that’s incredible. What else can you do?”

Caleb snaps his fingers, and Frumpkin appears in his lap.

Fjord freezes. “Oh. Uh.”

“Do you not like cats?”

“No, no, I like them fine. They’re good luck on a ship. Useful.” Fjord rubs the back of his neck, sheepish. “I’m allergic, is all.”

“Ah.” Caleb coaxes Frumpkin up onto his shoulders and gives his cat a scratch. “I can summon him in a different form, if you—?”

“No, that’s okay, don’t bother.”

Caleb eyes Fjord.

Fjord stifles a sneeze.

“I will just snap him away for now,” Caleb says, and does so.

“Right,” Fjord says. “Thanks. Uh. Got anything else?”

“Nothing else to cast at the bubble,” Caleb says, “but there are many more spells.”

They spend the next hour discussing every spell Caleb knows, and a few he doesn’t. Fjord is curious, courteous, insatiable; Caleb finds himself drawing arcane diagrams in the dirt and on scraps of old paper as he tries to explain the Alarm spell. None of it will help them break the curse, and he considers getting up and going back to the library, but Fjord asks him whether an ever-burning lamp shares any similarities to Dancing Lights and they spiral off into conversation again.

Eventually, they drift from arcana to other topics: fireworks and circuses, festivals and holidays, Menagerie Coast dances, Zemni Fields candy. Caleb learns that Fjord hates mint, but makes an exception for a mixed drink peculiar to Port Damali.

And it’s easy to forget, however briefly, that they are trapped in a curse that will drain their souls of all vitality and bind them to an eldritch being for eternity.

 

Nott visits one morning, but she’s only managed to uncover one more variation on the stories in town, and she and Caleb spend most of the conversation just chatting. It reminds Caleb of something, though, when he returns to the library to see Fjord sitting under the leaded windows with a map and a reference book.

“You know,” he says without preamble, “there are stories about this castle in the village. And... about you.”

Fjord looks up. “Yeah, I know.”

“Nott has been looking them up for me. As research.”

“Sure.”

“I was wondering, though.” Caleb pauses. “How did those stories come to be?”

Fjord closes the reference book and puts the map aside. “Well, the castle’s been here for ages. Hundreds of years. I don’t know about the town, but I figure there’s always gonna be stories about something like this, you know?”

“ _Ja_ , sure. That is how small towns work.”

“Right.” Fjord nods. “As for me... a couple kids came up here last year. On a dare or something. So I went down and told them to scram, and if I had to guess, they said they saw a monster in the castle and that’s why they didn’t stay the night, steal the wine, whatever.”

“They thought you were a monster?”

“Doubt it. I think they just wanted a good story.”

“Do you mind it?”

“Nah. I don’t hear the stories anyway. And it’s kind of... kind of expected, you know.” Fjord gestures at himself, a self-deprecating wave of a hand. “I’m no fairy-tale prince.”

“That is not true,” Caleb says. “You are— you are rather handsome, Fjord.” He feels himself blushing and stammers, “Ah. _Ja_. That is all.”

Fjord looks at him, a smile growing slowly. “Well, thank you kindly.”

“It is just the truth.”

“Sure.”

 

“Have you ever been to Tal’Dorei?” Fjord asks one afternoon, apropos of nothing, as far as Caleb can tell.

“Ah, no. I have hardly left the Empire.” Caleb pauses. “Why do you ask?”

“Just thinking,” Fjord says. He’s leaning over a table, pinning a massive roll of paper open beneath his hands.

Caleb sets his book aside and goes over to Fjord. The map Fjord is examining is a scale image of all of Exandria. A rarity. Caleb hasn’t seen a map like this one in years.

But at a closer look, he realizes this isn’t just any world map. Rather than showing borders and capitals, all the detail is on the oceans. Trade routes are marked, as are ports, currents, and shoals.

“A nautical map?” Caleb asks.

“Yeah. Found it back when we got here.”

Caleb traces the Menagerie Coast with a finger. “Port Damali?”

“Right there.” Fjord points. “And we’re around here.” He indicates a spot on the coast northeast of the port.

“Are you plotting a route?” Caleb asks.

It’s a guess, but it seems to be a good one. Fjord nods, one hand drifting from the eastern coast of Wildemout to the curling shape of Marquet. “Always wanted to see the Bay of Gifts.” His fingers brush, light as a caress, over the soundings in the bay, the lines marking safe routes. “But there’s steady work on the Coast. Might be a safer bet.”

“I think,” Caleb says, “that after all of this, no one could blame you for picking up and leaving.”

Fjord smiles, and turns back to the map. “Need a new ship anyway. Unless _Tide’s Breath_ washed up somewhere. New papers, new port... but I don’t mind dreaming a little.”  

 

It’s evening, and Caleb can feel the night drawing in. He sinks deeper into his armchair, opening to the first page of _Demigods of the Benthos: A Treatise_. Maybe if he reads fast he’ll have an excuse in time to—

Beau appears in the doorway, candle flames flickering. “Hey, guys. Dinner.”

Fjord gets up from his seat, stretching his arms above his head so that his shirt strains over his chest. “Be there in a sec. Caleb?”

“Hm?”

“Dinner’s ready.”

“ _Ja_ , I will be down.”

Fjord sighs, and then a moment later he’s bending over Caleb and gently prying _Demigods of the Benthos_ from his hands. “Nope. You haven’t eaten all day. C’mon.”

“This could be important—” Caleb looks up at Fjord and trails off. Fjord is giving him a look he can’t quite place, encouraging but a little resigned, complete with a hesitant half-smile, and he just folds. “ _Ja._ Okay. I will come.”

“Good,” Fjord says, and they walk down to the kitchens together.

The dinner conversation starts as the usual discussion of everyone’s day, but quickly devolves into a fight over cilantro. Most of the residents of Windflower Castle can’t eat food in their current forms, but that doesn’t seem to stop them from having opinions on it, and Caleb finds himself getting dragged into the argument even though he really doesn’t feel strongly about cilantro.

He doesn’t get back to the library for two hours. He keeps meaning to go back, but then Fjord glances over at him, already smiling, and he decides to stay a moment more.

But eventually the conversation winds down, and Caleb finds his way back to the library to get reading again.

 

Later that night, he slams _Demigods of the Benthos: A Treatise_ shut and tosses it onto the discard pile. It had seemed promising, even perfect, but as he read the text devolved into bizarre rambling, and from there into an endless string of scribbled glyphs that somehow managed to be simultaneously disturbing and underwhelming. After that, every page was full of smeared ink that occasionally depicted screaming faces and slit-pupiled eyes.

It’s late, but after _Demigods of the Benthos_ , Caleb is too irritated to sleep. It really should be common sense not to write a text on eldritch extradimensional beings if your mind can’t hand the undiluted power of the void.

But the fact remains, inescapable in the silence of a late night, that Caleb is running out of options. It’s been over a week, and he still can’t seem to find a single clue to breaking this curse. Neither can anyone else. All Nott has been able to find is folklore and hearsay. Fjord hasn’t found anything definitive in the nautical texts. And Jester, Beau, Caduceus, and Yasha have only made one suggestion...

As soon as Caleb thinks of it, he immediately tries to distract himself. That won’t be useful. It won’t pan out at all. He probably won’t find any information on breaking a curse that way. No, he’d better focus on arcane theory.

But as he gets up and goes back into the maze of shelves, he finds himself scanning the books he’d overlooked so far, and finally he picks up _Love and the Arcane: A Historical Review_. He doesn’t take it back to his workspace. Instead, he stands in the shadow of the shelf, casts a set of Dancing Lights, and turns to the first page.

_The study of arcana_ , the book tells him, _is a long and well-known tradition. Arcane spellcasting is common throughout Exandria, save in limited areas. Academic study is highly advanced, and it seems certain that we will one day regain the power of the Age of Arcanum._

_Yet in all the centuries of arcane knowledge we have accumulated, no one has ever truly come to understand the force that we call ‘love’._

“This is not going to work,” Caleb says aloud. “This is pointless. I should sleep.”

He puts the book back on the shelf and starts walking away.

He gets to the end of the bookshelf before coming to a stop. He looks over his shoulder.

He turns around.

_Love and the Arcane: A Historical Review_ has a table of contents. Caleb opens to it and runs his finger down the chapter headings. The third to last is called “True Love’s Kiss: Rumored Efficacy and Related Theories”.

The chapter is inconclusive. Mostly inconclusive. It starts with an overview of true love’s kiss in fairy tales. Some, Caleb remembers being told as a child, but others are unfamiliar. From there, the author moves on to stories of a kiss breaking a curse. Most of the cases are clerics using a kiss to cast Greater Restoration, but there are a few outliers.

Two shepherds who stumbled into the Feywild. A mapmaker and a caravan guard in a dracolich’s lair. A pair of adventurers who nearly fell to a beholder. _With the touch of their lips, the victim was restored_.

The author has theories. It might be a divine blessing at just the right moment. It might be a spark of long-dormant arcane power. It might be a clause inherent in certain curses. Or it might, really and truly, be the power of love.         

_Whatever your personal belief_ , the chapter concludes, _it is undeniable that true love’s kiss can, in certain situations, carry incredible power. The implications of this fact are yet to be uncovered._

Caleb stands there, staring at the page, for a long, long time.

Then he puts the book back on the shelf, exactly as he found it, and leaves the library in silence.

 

 

_V. gleams and is gone_

 

The day of the ball begins as days have for the past ten days. Caleb wakes up before dawn (though only he knows it’s dawn beneath the thickly clouded sky) and goes to the library to keep reading. Fjord arrives a little later, having eaten breakfast, and brings Caleb something as well, though Caleb has never once asked him to. They spend the day immersed in cracked tomes with stained, faded pages. And they find many possible leads, but nothing that pans out, nothing useful, nothing that will help them escape.

Around nine that morning, Caleb closes _On The Breaking of Pacts_ , which had looked promising but was mostly speculation on the higher orders of Infernal contracts. He puts it with the rest of its equally unhelpful fellows and passes Fjord on his way back to the bookshelf they’ve been working through.

“That one not useful?” Fjord asks, looking back over his shoulder at Caleb. The stack of books in his arms trembles, and he quickly clutches it to his chest.

“It could have been. But no. Not useful.” Caleb runs his fingers over the books arrayed before him and pulls _Secrets of the Deep_ off the shelf. Based on the title alone, it has equal chances of being a scholarly work on kraken, a collection of sailors’ yarns, or anatomically improbable mermaid smut. Caleb flips to the first page.

...or all the ink could have been stained into a gruesome indigo mess by the touch of the thing that rules this castle. Caleb tucks the book under his arm and continues down the shelf. “Fjord?”

He means to ask whether Fjord had ever read _Secrets of the Deep_ , but Fjord doesn’t reply.

“Fjord?” Caleb asks again.

This time, there is a sound: the crash of a pile of books falling. Caleb turns in time to see Fjord grab onto a bookshelf for support and then crumple noiselessly to the ground. “Fjord!” he shouts, and rushes over to him. By the time he gets there, Fjord is choking, his spit flecked red. Caleb flails helplessly for a moment, then grabs his shoulders, helping him sit up. “Fjord, Fjord,” he mutters aimlessly, “come on, breathe...”

Fjord leans forward and vomits a spray of salt water, which gives way to hard, hacking coughs, and then to gasps, and at last he breathes easily again. He wipes his mouth on the back on his hand and finally looks up at Caleb. “The flower,” he says, in a voice scraped raw by salt. “Another petal—” His voice trails off into another series of coughs.

“Don’t speak,” Caleb says, rather than, as he desperately wants to, demanding to know if another petal has truly fallen. “It’s— there’s time. There will be time.”

Fjord shakes his head and goes to stand, but sways; Caleb hauls him upright and guides him into the nearest chair. “I’ll get Caduceus.”

Fjord seems about to protest, but finally nods, and Caleb hurries down to the kitchen. Caduceus is there, as always, and when Caleb describes Fjord’s sudden collapse and the salt water that spilled from his mouth, he tells Caleb to take the tea service and bounds from the room. Caleb nearly has to jog to keep up with the teapot— Caduceus may be less than a foot tall in this form, but he can move when he wants to— and they make it back up to the library in a matter of minutes.

Fjord’s head snaps up when they enter, but he relaxes when he sees Caduceus. “Another petal fell,” he rasps.

“Seems so,” Caduceus agrees, and plucks the tea service from Caleb’s grasp as his spout begins to leak steam. He pours a cup of amber tea and dashes in three spoonfuls of honey. Fjord accepts the cup and sips from it slowly.

“Is this all you can do?” Caleb asks Caduceus. Fjord is no longer a heap on the floor or vomiting seawater, but his gaze is aimless, his chest is rising and falling in flutters, and his lips are still flecked with blood and salt.

“All for now,” Caduceus says. “It’s never been this bad before.”

Fjord knocks back the rest of the tea and eyes them. “No need to talk about me behind my back right in front of me, okay?” His voice is mostly back to its usual smooth drawl.

“Behind your back and right in front of you?” Caleb asks, trying to get a smile out of him. “We can hardly do both.”

Fjord rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.” He gets up from the chair and bends down to return the teacup to Caduceus. “I’m going to go change my shirt.” He plucks at the hem, flicking a drop of water from it. “Might’ve ruined this one.”

Fjord departs, and Caleb watches him go, checking his steps for any waver, any sign of weakness. Though, if there was any, Fjord wouldn’t show it.

“I’ll go check on him in a moment,” Caduceus says. “But first of all, what happened?”

Caleb recounts the last several minutes. Caduceus muses, “So we’re down to two petals now.”

“How long do you think it will be?” Caleb asks.

Caduceus looks at him with the steady, serious face of someone who is used to giving bad news. “Two weeks,” he says. “At most. Probably much less.”

“That is not very long.”

“No,” Caduceus says. “It isn’t.” He picks up the tea service, holding it precariously before him, and ambles away. At the door, he pauses and looks back. “Mister Caleb—”

“Yes?”

“Take care of yourself, all right?” Caduceus says, before vanishing into the hall.

Caleb stays fixed in place for a long minute, just breathing. Finally, he turns to the books still scattered where Fjord fell, like sails torn from ships. He lifts each volume in his hands and stacks it carefully atop the next, forming a pile, and places the pile on a nearby end table. He pulls up a stool, selects the topmost book on the pile, and begins to read.

It’s impossible to focus. His mind is reeling, torn between the moments of Fjord’s collapse and _two weeks, at most_.

Maybe he should go look at the anemone. See for himself.

Decision made, Caleb slaps his book back on the pile and goes to the door. As he approaches, he hears a faint swish in the hallway: Jester must be passing. He turns on his heel and grabs a slim tome from the nearest shelf, where he’d noticed it while looking for more reading material. The book is entitled _The Knight of Willow Vale_ , and the cover features one woman in armor and another in silks embracing under a willow bower; Jester would probably enjoy it.

By the time Caleb gets out into the hallway, Jester is vanishing up the winding staircase that leads to the tower, so he follows her. He has one foot up on the steps when he hears Beau’s voice.

“Whoa, Jester,” she’s saying, “Jessie, what’s wrong?”

“Another petal fell,” Jester says, and her voice trembles. “There’s only two left. This isn’t how it’s meant to go, Beau. This isn’t what it’s like in the stories. Why is this happening?”

“Oh, no, Jester,” Beau says. “No, hey. C’mere. We’re gonna figure this out, okay?”

“Yeah.” It sounds very small.

“We have time. We’ll get you back to Nicodranas, you’re gonna see your mom and the Traveler again, okay, Jessie? I promise.”

“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I’m gonna keep this one,” Beau says. “I know I’m not the most honest person, but— just trust me, okay?”

“Okay,” Jester says.

“We’re gonna be fine,” Beau says. “We’re gonna be fine. And we’ll have a crazy-ass story to tell. And we’re gonna be— we’re gonna be _us_ again, Jessie, I swear.”

“I can’t wait to be a person again.”

A pause, and then Beau says, much softer, “Me either.”

Caleb turns from the stairs and makes his way back down the hall, keeping his steps quiet. He continues past the library to the grotto at the other end, where the anemone is dying.

Sure enough, another petal has fallen, and only two are still clinging to the stem. They are as blue as the sea in storm and they look so very, very small.

Caleb stares at the flower for a long, long while.

Then he turns and goes back to the library. He has work to do.

 

Caleb is knee-deep in historic tide charts when, shortly before noon, the door swings open and smashes into the wall. “Caleb!” Jester shouts.

“Oh, I have a book for you,” Caleb says, and tries to step clear of the tide charts. Instead, he brings the nearest stack crashing down on himself. “Over there,” he calls, shoving the charts aside. “On that shelf. No, that shelf. _Ja_. It’s called _The Knight of Willow Vale_.”

“Caleb, did you find me _smut_?” Jester asks.

“I believe I did.”

Jester flicks through the first couple pages, and her eyes grow wide. “Ooh, Caleb, this is _definitely_ smut.” She puts the book down on the stack and continues, “But that’s not what I came to tell you.”

“What is it, then?” Caleb asks, finally extracting himself from the tide charts. Uk’otoa keeps very good records, if nothing else.

Jester folds her hands in front of herself and clears her throat. “You, Caleb Widogast, are formally invited to a Windflower Castle Formal Ball, to be held in the hall at seven o’clock tonight. Clothes, food, and music all provided. Bring yourself and your fanciest footwork.” She winks.

“There’s a ball?” Caleb asks. “Tonight?”

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”

“I don’t have nice clothes.”

“Clothes are provided!” Jester says. “Also a bath.”

“I suppose there’s no way I can talk myself out of this,” Caleb says.

“Nope!” Jester agrees. She grabs _The Knight of Willow Vale_ and swoops out of the room, calling, “Don’t be late!”

And Caleb tries to focus on the tide charts, he really does, but it doesn’t take much attention to skim through and mark the most violent storms for later perusal. So his mind wanders to Jester’s invitation.

_Clothes, food, and music all provided_ , Jester had said. He’ll probably be stuffed into a suit. But the food will be good, especially if Caduceus is in on this plan. And there will be music.

A ball usually entails dinner and dancing. _Bring yourself and your fanciest footwork_. It would be difficult to dance with Beau, Jester, Caduceus, or Yasha, trapped as they are in solid forms. Which leaves... Fjord.

Will Fjord want to dance? Does he know how? Caleb learned all the formal Empire dances at one time in his life, though he hasn’t had cause to practice in years. But he thinks he can remember the steps. The way it felt, at the very least— double time, triple time, the steps and turns. Leading and following. A stiff blue coat, matching... his partners’ attire.

But this is Fjord, whose eyes are too bright for darkness, whose hands do not threaten to strike. It will be a good night, Caleb thinks, and it will cheer them all up.

So he goes back to flipping through the tide charts, and when he hears himself humming in sweet triple time, he doesn’t stop.

A few minutes before six, there’s a tap on the open door, and Yasha says, “Caleb? Beau says you need to get ready.”

“Oh. Ah— all right.” Caleb puts the last tide chart down and meets Yasha at the door. “Is Beau also in on this?”

“Beau suggested it,” Yasha says.

“Oh, I see,” Caleb says, stomach sinking. A ball put on by Jester would be fun, and probably only involve giggling and sideways glances. But a ball put on by Beau will have an ulterior motive, and it will be _planned_.

Yasha leads him to the east wing, but makes for a door at the far end of the hall. There is a water closet attached to Caleb’s room, so he didn’t bother with the larger chamber; he got used to washing with salt water quickly enough. “I can bathe in my own room,” he points out, but Yasha shakes her head.

“Caduceus has your outfit in here.”

“Caduceus also planned this?”

“We all did,” Yasha says.

“And Fjord?”

“All of us except Fjord.”

“I see,” Caleb says, and knocks carefully on the door.

After a moment of rustling, Beau emerges. Her three little candle flames dance with the air that rushes through as she opens the door. “Go in and get cleaned up.” She peers at him. “Maybe shave.”

“ _Ja_ , all right, fine,” Caleb grouses, without any real heat. Beau scoots around his legs, and Caleb enters, closing the door behind him.

The washroom is full of fresh-smelling steam. A copper claw-foot bathtub takes up most of the room, and a sheaf of dark, glossy fabric— probably formalwear— is draped over a side table. It looks nicer than anything Caleb’s worn in years.

Caduceus is up on the table, next to the draped fabric. At Caleb’s entrance, he hops down. “I found something for you to wear in one of the wardrobes. It looked your size.”

“Ah— thank you. I am sure it will be fine.”

“You get yourself tidied up, all right?” Caduceus says. “I’ll be outside.”

Caduceus ambles out the door and closes it, and then Caleb is finally alone.

He stands there for a while, breathing in the steam. When he finally disrobes, he does it quickly and steps into the bathtub before he can talk himself out of it. There’s soap on the edge of the bath, faintly herb-scented; Caleb washes and gets out, taking the towel on the side table and eyeing the outfit laid beside it.

He doesn’t approach it immediately. Instead, he goes to the mirror and wipes a patch clear of steam, peering at his face in the glass.

Caleb goes to the door, hoping Caduceus is still outside. “Hello?”

“Hey,” Caduceus says, muffled by the door. “How’s it going?”

“Do you have, ah, a razor?”

“Hmm. I think Fjord is using his. Give me a moment.” Before Caleb can protest at Caduceus apparently taking Fjord’s razor for his sake, he hears the slow patter of teapot feet disappearing down the hallway.

Caleb stays at the door for a minute, hoping Caduceus really meant a moment and not however long it would take him to pursue this idea, before giving up and going back to the clothing on the side table. There is a double-breasted tailcoat, a white shirt, and a dark pair of trousers. At a closer look, the coat is the shadowed green of mountain pine, densely embroidered with twining ivy in dark gold thread that blends into the rest of the coat. Its color does not change when Caleb lifts it to the light, only deepens, as though immersed in amber.

It is very fine clothing. It is the finest clothing Caleb has seen in years. Even when— back when— his best uniforms didn’t approach the quality of this suit.

He lays the coat down and dons the shirt and trousers, although they don’t fit perfectly; the shirt is broad in the shoulder, and the trousers are nearly too short. Caleb is standing in his shirtsleeves and considering the coat— its high collar, long tails, double row of brass buttons— when a knock comes softly at the door.

“Hello?” Yasha says, muffled. “Caduceus told me you wanted a shave.”

Caleb hurries to the door and lets her in. “ _Ja_ , I did. Do you have a razor?”

Yasha shrugs slightly. “No. But I do have this.” With one fluid gesture, she unlimbers the pendulum from her case. In her pale wooden hands, it’s even more swordlike— wide and flat, with a tapered point and two sharp edges. Razor sharp, even. “I am very good with it,” Yasha says.

“Are there no other razors in the castle?” Caleb asks.

“No,” Yasha says. “Sorry. I’d have brought you one, but Fjord was using it and Caduceus said I should just come instead.”

Caleb eyes the sword. “Ah— all right. Very well.” He sits on the edge of the bath, tilting his chin up and trying not to move at all. Yasha moves closer, and then he feels the press of the pendulum-sword along his jaw.

Caleb keeps his eyes fixed on the far wall, breathing shallowly, as Yasha slowly shaves the scruff from his chin. She nearly nicks him once, then apologizes and course-corrects. Caleb has never found shaving meditative, and this is no exception, since someone else is holding a blade near his face, but he manages to relax. The room is still slightly hazy with steam, and smells almost flowery. Not like anemones— some other flower, grown far from here.

After some time, Yasha asks, “Are you excited?”

“What?”

“For the ball.”

“Oh.” Caleb considers saying no, and then changes his mind, and then changes it again, and says, “Ah— maybe. I was somewhat blindsided by it.”

“Yeah,” Yasha says. “We were too. Not just by the ball.”

“I am sorry—”

“Not you. Not really you, anyway. The petals have been falling faster, and then all of this,” Yasha says. Her blade skates along Caleb’s chin. “It’ll be a nice night, anyway. Don’t worry about me.”

“No, it is appreciated,” Caleb says. “To know that I am not the only one feeling... out of place.”

“I think we are all feeling out of place,” Yasha says. “Or trapped in one place. Either.” She makes one last pass with her pendulum-sword and steps away, tucking it back into the hollow of her tall-case chest. “There you go.”

Caleb runs a hand over his face, marveling at the smooth skin under his fingers. “Thank you.”

“Any time,” Yasha says.

She departs, and Caleb is alone again.

He gets up from the edge of the bathtub, stretches his back, examines his new shave in the mirror, splashes water on his face, looks for a brush, sees none, combs his fingers through his hair, fixes his shirt collar, and finds himself back at the side table, picking up the dark green tailcoat.

Slowly, he puts it around himself, tugging at the cuffs and collar so that it falls flat along his shoulders. A very close fit. He takes his time with the buttons, doing up the inner row and then the outer row, leaving the last open.

He turns to the mirror.

The man who looks back at him isn’t unfamiliar. His hair is reddish, curling damply, near shoulder length; his eyes are tired, but then, his eyes have been tired since he turned sixteen. His face is clean. His double-breasted tailcoat is a dark and gleaming green, and the twining ivy stitched across it shines faintly in the light from the high window.

Caleb nods to his reflection and leaves the room.

Jester and Yasha are both in the hallway, apparently mid-conversation, and they look up as he slips out of the bathroom and shuts the door behind him. “Oh, Caleb!” Jester gasps. “You look so _handsome!_ I knew that coat would be perfect!” She turns to Yasha, sparing Caleb the necessity of answering. “Did you shave him, Yasha?”

“Yes, I did,” Yasha says.

“Why wouldn’t Fjord let you, do you think?” Jester asks.

“Probably because he had his own razor.” Yasha looks back at Caleb. “Are you ready to go?”

“Ready as ever,” he says.

Jester grins, swooping ahead. “Then come on! Dinner’s in the hall!”

They stroll through the corridor and down the staircase. The doors to the ballroom have been flung wide, and light floods through, lending a shine to the dim blue stone tiles. “You’ve got a seat,” Jester whispers gleefully, and then she whisks away. Yasha, too, has vanished, silent despite her size, and Caleb passes the threshold alone.

The long banquet table is set just where it was on the night Caleb and Nott arrived at the castle, and piled with food once again: a carved ham, a platter of roast vegetables arranged in interesting ways, syrupy fruit on skewers, bread rolls, iced cakes. A feast.

And beyond it all, sitting before an empty plate with a napkin tucked into his collar, is Fjord. At this distance, Caleb can barely see a dark plum half-cloak draped over one shoulder and a smoke-gray waistcoat underneath.

At Caleb’s entrance, Fjord sits forward in his chair as if to stand. “Caleb— hello.”

“Good evening,” Caleb says, and takes the open seat before him. He and Fjord are at opposite ends of the table, ridiculously far apart for only two people eating together. Caleb assesses the platters of food before him and forks a slice of ham onto his plate. When he looks up to reach for the bread rolls, he sees Fjord still watching him. “What is it?”

“You look pretty used to those clothes,” Fjord says.

Caleb shakes his head. “These are unfamiliar to me.”

“Not what I meant.” Fjord plucks his fork from the table and reaches for the roast vegetables, his half-cape flapping with the motion. He shrugs the cape back to keep it out of the platter, and finally folds it out of the way. “See, I’m all tangled up here. You look comfortable. Uh, well suited.”

Caleb snorts.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s a good look on you, that’s all,” Fjord says, and somehow his voice seems very honest, then.

“Ah.” Caleb splits a bread roll with his knife and glances around for the butter. “Thank you, I suppose.”

“Course,” Fjord says, and slides the butter dish down the table to him. Caleb nods his gratitude and butters the roll, then sets into his meal. Fjord does the same.

After a minute of silence, Caleb says, “There isn’t much small talk to be made, is there.”

Fjord chuckles. “Not when we’re both stuck in the same castle.”

“If we were at a formal ball, I could ask after your health.”

“You could indeed,” Fjord says.

Caleb peers at him. “Are you well, then?”

“Generally,” Fjord says, “I’m cursed by an eldritch terror that wants to eat my soul.” He clears his throat, and his voice turns formal. “More particularly, I find myself... better since this morning. And yourself?”

“I am well, thank you,” Caleb says, and raises the glass at his elbow, full to the brim with dark wine. “A toast to both our health.”

Fjord raises his glass as well. “To our health.”

They both drink, and Caleb replaces his glass. “So that is our health discussed. What else? The ways we arrived here aren’t really good dinner conversation. I will not ask about your— ah, your carriage ride, or whether your journey was long.”

“The carriage was awful ship-like,” Fjord says. “And the journey was far too long. Never even stopped to rest the horses.” He tears off a piece of a bread roll. “Though we did have horses on the ship once.”

“Did you? What for?”

“Just taking them down the coast, to the market in Port Zoon,” Fjord says. “Not too long a trip, but we had to figure out how to muck out horses on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and let me tell you, that’s not easy.”

The conversation progresses from there; Fjord recounts some of his more remarkable trips, and Caleb contributes the mishaps of his own travels, until they’ve both cleaned their plates and the candles have burned low.

Then there’s a sound, soft but sweet, in the near distance: the press of a single piano key, as if the player intends to begin as slowly as possible, to show how a beginning ought to go. This note is followed by another, and another, and the sequence repeats in triple time, slow as a sea wind at dusk.

Fjord takes his napkin from his collar and places it carefully at his elbow. He rises from his chair, straightening his waistcoat and half-cape, and begins to walk the length of the table.

Caleb holds himself very still.

Fjord stops two steps from Caleb’s seat and, with a slight bow, offers his hand. “Shall we?” He looks up and catches Caleb’s gaze, a crooked smile nudging past his formal expression. His face is a study in candlelight. “Seems like a waste not to dance. We are at a ball, after all.”

“ _Ja_ , I suppose we are.” Caleb stands and places his hand on Fjord’s— not holding, but simply resting there, light as a sparrow. “Do you know how to dance?”

“Do I know how to dance!” Fjord sounds affronted, but his tone remains light as he and Caleb step away from the long table and into the open heart of the hall. “Now, who do you think I am? Of course I know how to dance.”

“You should lead, then,” Caleb says. “You’re taller.” He faces Fjord and offers his other hand.

The ostinato continues, but a melody begins to sound over it, high and sweet and dancing of its own accord. Fjord places one hand on Caleb’s waist, and Caleb puts his on Fjord’s shoulder, bringing them close. It has been years since Caleb danced with someone. But he recalls the steps as Fjord draws him into the beginnings of a waltz— _one, two, three, one, two, three_ , whispers a corner of his mind.

They turn in a slow circle, spinning on their own private axis in the glimmering half-light of the ballroom. Fjord moves with a surety that Caleb cannot help but follow; he finds himself leaning into the steps and turns, anticipating every rise and fall with the waltz that trips its winding way beneath the candlelight.

“You are very good,” Caleb says, his voice far softer than he meant it to be. A step, a turn. “Where did you learn?”

Fjord’s mouth quirks in that familiar smile. “Beau and Jess taught me this morning.”

Caleb raises his eyebrows. “This morning, really?”

“Well, Jester said I had to learn to dance properly, since you knew how.” Fjord nods at their hands, still pressed together as they move in the small triple step.

“You are a quick study,” Caleb says, finally. “For having learned this morning.” They sway, once, on the spot, and then begin to move again.

“Maybe,” Fjord says. “But you make it awful easy.”

Caleb stares— up slightly— at Fjord. Meets his candle-flame eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just that you’re a lot better than I am,” Fjord says.

Caleb shakes his head. “Not so much better.”

“All right then,” Fjord says, sweeping back into another pass and turn. Caleb leans into Fjord’s hold, pushing them faster, spinning them swift and weightless as a kite on a string, determined, somehow, to show Fjord how well the two of them can dance together. Fjord’s half-cape flashes in a dark swath of velvet with every turn; Caleb feels the tug of his tailcoat flaring out behind him, and he could do this forever if Fjord was willing— dance the night away in this vaulted ballroom and never let the world return.

The music slows, eventually. It could have been hours; it could have been seconds. The melody fades into a softer, sweeter tune. Together, he and Fjord circle slowly, testing the quiet that has grown between them.

After a moment, Fjord begins a stately turn and lifts his hand, and Caleb spins himself out in increments, returns, finds Fjord’s hand in the air. Turns with him. A step, a sway.

“You,” Fjord says lowly, “are a master dancer, Caleb Widogast.”

Fjord’s eyes are so bright, so honest, that Caleb has to look away. He breathes out, “You are full of flattery tonight.”

“Not flattery if it’s the truth,” Fjord says.

They are chest to chest, moving so close Caleb can feel Fjord’s slow intake of breath and gradual exhale— could hear it, if not for the roaring of his heart in his ears and the waltz that still whispers in the half-light.

He meets Fjord’s gaze again, and Fjord smiles. It’s a small thing, but so clear, so unthinking, that it drives the breath from Caleb’s chest. They’re barely moving now, just swaying on the spot. Fjord is so close, his hands sure and steady where they hold Caleb’s own, and Caleb finds himself drawn in. Nearer, and nearer still, wondering how Fjord would react if he pulled him closer, if he leaned up and kissed him—

if he kissed him—

Caleb stumbles back. His hands break from Fjord’s like a promise, but it doesn’t matter— it cannot matter. Not even tonight.

“Caleb?” Fjord says, all confusion and goldenrod eyes, and Caleb just shakes his head.

“I’m sorry. I— I cannot. Excuse me, please—”

He turns and runs.

 

 

_VI. the sea of faith_

 

It’s Beau who comes to confront him, eventually. Caleb had guessed someone would. In some ways, he thinks it’ll be easier to talk with Beau. She’ll be blunt. She won’t try to dance around the subject, and if she pulls a confession out of him at least she’ll keep it secret. He thinks, anyway.

So he goes to the library, and he stays there, reading but not processing any of the words. He focuses on Frumpkin’s warm weight in his lap.

Beau arrives in the early morning. He hears her steps coming down the hall, a steady, metallic tapping. Yasha makes a smoother, more hollow sound. Caduceus scrapes a little with every step. Jester swishes faintly, and only Fjord has footfalls at all. How does he know them so well already?

Beau appears in the doorway. “Hey, Caleb.”

“Hello,” he says.

“We gotta talk,” Beau says, coming closer.

“ _Ja_ , I thought so.” He sets his book aside.

Beau hops up on the side table to look him in the eye. “So, the ball last night. What happened?”

“Did you not see?”

“I mean, yeah, I saw. We all saw. And we all want to know what the fuck happened, Widogast.”

Caleb looks down. “We ate dinner. We danced. I realized that it would be prudent to depart.”

“Bullshit,” Beau says. “You were looking into each other’s eyes, slow dancing like kids. Then you ran out on him. What happened? Did he say something? Did you say something? What?”

“Nothing happened,” Caleb says. “Fjord was a gentleman. I fucked it up.”

Beau doesn’t say anything, and Caleb finally looks back at her. She’s starting at him, arms crossed, with a strange expression on her face. “What?” he asks.

“You fucking fell in love with him, didn’t you,” she says. “You realized it, or whatever. You’re completely head over heels for him.”

Caleb looks away.

“Shit, _really_?” Beau says.

“Maybe. _Ja_ ,” Caleb says. There’s an odd tightness in his chest. “So you see. I had to go.”

“You could’ve said something,” she says. Her voice has gone soft and Caleb finds himself hating it. “You didn’t have to just run out of there.”

“I couldn’t stay.”

“That was a dick move,” Beau says.

“I— _ja_ , I know.”

“Fjord cried all night.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“No, you’re right, he didn’t,” Beau agrees. “But he’s messed up about it, and pretending not to be. Kinda like you.” She sits and swings her legs over the edge of the table. “So you’re into him, huh?”

“I— suppose so.”

“Gonna be honest, I don’t really see it, but guys aren’t my thing, so I guess I might be—”

“Please stop talking.”

“Yeah,” Beau says, and looks away.

After a moment of silence, Caleb says, “You aren’t pestering me about true love’s kiss.”

“Not like it’d be helpful.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“Right.”

“Do you believe that it could— work, somehow?” Caleb asks.

Beau shakes her head. The flame on her head flickers with the motion. “Nah. It was fun, but... that’s a storybook thing. And magic doesn’t work that way.”

“That is exactly what I was saying,” Caleb says.

“Jessie told me about that, yeah.” Beau stretches her arms over her head. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’s gonna pester you about it again. Seeing you run out kinda popped her bubble. She’s into all that fairy-tale shit.”

“You and she aren’t particularly fairy-tale, though,” Caleb says.

“I’m not. But it makes her happy. And the romance stuff is kinda fun, so, it’s not bad.”

“You are a sap, Beauregard.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Beau says. “She makes me sappy.” She gets to her feet. “Anyway. You have to talk to Fjord at some point. Preferably soon. Sort out whatever’s going on between you, and then figure out a way to get us out of this fucking castle.”

“There is nothing going on between us.”

Beau gives him a look. “You’re in love with him.”

“And there is also nothing between us.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Beau says. She hops off the table and heads toward the door.

“Beauregard,” Caleb calls.

Beau stops. “Yeah, what?”

“Don’t tell him. Don’t tell— don’t tell anyone, please.”

“Yeah,” Beau says. “All right.”

“Thank you.”

“Course.”

She leaves.

 

Caleb spends the day reading, and the evening, and continues late into the night. He does not go down to dinner. Instead, he falls asleep over a book on sirens, and only wakes when his stomach starts cramping too painfully to ignore.

It’s a little before five in the morning, so he sets the book aside and goes down to the kitchen. No one should be around.

Sure enough, the hallway outside the library is completely dark. Caleb walks quietly down the stairs, feeling his way. When he reaches the bottom, he hears a faint shifting from the foyer, and he stops in his tracks, staring into the darkness.

“Hello?” he calls quietly.

Another rustle, and an image resolves: Yasha, her tall pale form ghostlike in the dark. She nods at him. “You should eat something.”

“I am planning on it.”

“And you should talk to Fjord.”

“I am... considering it.”

“Are you really?”

Caleb doesn’t try to lie.

“Time is precious, you know,” Yasha says. “When you care about someone. You never know how much time you have.” Without another word, she recedes back into the shadows of the foyer.

Caleb continues as quietly as possible, nudging the door of the ballroom open and crossing the tiles on light feet. The fireplace is cold, and the long table has been cleared. The rest of the room yawns open, dark and far too vast, and he hurries through it to the kitchen door on the far wall.

The door creaks as it opens, and faint light leaks out. Caleb would just close the door and leave, but the creak was loud enough to alert whoever is inside, so he enters and shuts the door carefully behind him.

Caduceus is seated on the far counter, and he looks up as Caleb comes in. “Hello, Mister Caleb. You’re up early.”

“I suppose I am.”

“I don’t have much ready for you, but yesterday’s bread is on the table, or you can wait an hour for today’s. There should be some apples in the cabinet. And tea, if you want it.”

“I would. Thank you.” Caleb sits and spreads jam on a piece of yesterday’s bread. The first bite reminds him exactly how long it’s been since he last ate, and he starts slicing the rest of the loaf.

Caduceus pours a cup of tea and passes it to him. “I do have some questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

“I am an open book.”

“No, you aren’t, but that’s all right.” Caduceus pauses, seemingly deep in thought. Finally he asks, “What are you afraid of?”

“I am afraid of a lot of things.”

“Any in particular? Maybe whatever caused you to run out on our Mister Fjord?”

Caleb forces a chuckle. “You are perceptive.”

Caduceus dips his head, smiling.

“I am afraid,” Caleb says eventually, “of several things that pose a danger to myself and to everyone around me. Things that could... ruin me.”

“Things from your past.”

“ _Ja_.”

“I think,” Caduceus says slowly, “that you might be right. And wrong. But whatever you’re afraid of, it isn’t to do with Fjord?”

“No.”

“I thought not.” Caduceus nods to himself.

“I only worry,” Caleb says, “that my problems could... ensnare him. As well.”

“And you want to protect him. That’s very noble, Mister Caleb.”

Caleb shakes his head. “I am not a noble man. In fact, I am being selfish. I would harm him, just by proximity.”

“I’m not sure—”

“I _would_ ,” Caleb says, quick and desperate, needing Caduceus to comprehend the magnitude of what dogs his footsteps. “No one near me can be safe. Not from my past, and not from me— I am a risk just by my presence— the things that would be done, you do not understand—”

“I’m sure I don’t,” Caduceus says. “But I suppose you ought to explain that to him. You can’t choose for him, you know.”

“And if he chooses wrong?” Caleb asks finally.

“Well, who’s to say what’s wrong? Relationships are difficult,” Caduceus says.

“ _Ja_ , that we can agree on,” Caleb says, and knocks back most of the cup of tea.

              

Caleb goes down to the garden at mid-morning, and sure enough, Nott is coming up the walk. She waves. “Hi, Caleb!”

“Hello, Nott.”

“How’s the research going?”

“As well as it can be,” Caleb says. “We are trying to read as much as we can, but there isn’t enough in the library.”

“You and Fjord, right?”

“Ah. _Ja_. Fjord and I.”

Nott’s eyebrows shoot up. “What happened? Is something wrong? Did Fjord do something to you?”

“No— no, no,” Caleb says, trying to forestall the hail of questions. “Fjord has done nothing.”

“Something happened,” Nott insists. “You’re acting weird.” She peers at him a moment longer, then grins and singsongs, “Boy trouble?”

“No.”

“It _is!_ ” Nott yelps. “You and Fjord are up to things!”  
“We aren’t,” Caleb says. He can tell he isn’t getting out of this conversation, and elaborates: “I haven’t seen him in two days.”

“Why not?” Nott demands.

“It is my fault,” Caleb explains. “He was a perfect gentleman, and I, ah, got nervous.”

“Okay,” Nott says, “go back to the beginning and explain _everything_.”

So Caleb explains the petal falling, and the invitation, and the dinner, and the dance. “And I— I do not know, perhaps he meant something by it or perhaps he did not, but it hardly matters. I ran out of the room and I have not seen him since.”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Nott says, waving her hands. “You and Fjord were waltzing alone under candlelight in a castle ballroom, and you got nervous because you thought he didn’t like you back?”

“Nott, where is this coming from?” Caleb asks, exhausted. “Because I thought he didn’t like me back— there is so much more than that at stake! Also, why do you think I like him at all?”

“Oh, it’s obvious,” Nott says dismissively. “But you’re right, there are many more important things at stake! Like your happiness! And maybe even... true love’s kiss?”

“Wishful thinking will not make true love’s kiss a reality,” Caleb says.

“All right,” Nott agrees, “we’ll table that for now. But Caleb— you know it’s Fjord who doesn’t deserve you, right? Not the other way around. You’re a catch!”

This, of all things, startles a laugh out of Caleb. “Nott the Brave. I love you very much, but you are greatly mistaken.”  
“You are,” Nott insists. “You’re a powerful wizard! And you’re very handsome.”

“Ah— all right,” Caleb says, trying to speed up the conversation.

Nott nods firmly. “So you’ve got to tell him how you feel! Sweep him off his feet!”

“I am not physically capable of sweeping anyone off their feet.”

“Metaphorically then,” Nott says. “The good ol’ metaphorical feet sweep. Go for the ankles.”

“I... will keep that in mind,” Caleb says.

“Good,” Nott says.

Nott goes on to regale him with everything she’s been doing in town— fleecing people out of copper and silver, swapping stories in the tavern, even winning a drinking contest. All well disguised, she assures him. At noon, she starts back down the path, waving goodbye and shouting, “I’ll be back in two days!”

Caleb stands at the gate and watches her go, until her tiny form disappears into the mist and the rolling hills.

 

Caleb means to keep avoiding the inhabitants of Windflower Castle, and he succeeds in sequestering himself in the library for the rest of the day and well into the night. But as midnight draws in, he finally gives in to the hunger still gnawing at him and slips quietly down the stairs and through the darkened ballroom.

The kitchen door is actually cracked open this time, and a thin candlelight trails through it. Caleb stands transfixed, listening as hard as he can. There is a faint creak of chair legs and the tap of a fork on a plate. It couldn’t be Caduceus, Yasha, Jester, or Beau; none of them are capable of eating or making a chair creak.

So Fjord must be there.

Caleb considers his options. To approach the kitchen and enter: this sends a shiver through him. He has been avoiding Fjord, and Fjord has clearly been avoiding him as well, given that Caleb only stays in one place in the castle and would be easy to find if Fjord wanted to talk. So he won’t go in. Which leaves the second option: to turn around now and walk away. And stay wanting.

Caleb stands before the door and does not move an inch.

The ballroom is so dark, and the light from the kitchen seems unbearably bright though it is faint enough that it must come from a single candle, and if he doesn’t leave now Fjord will almost certainly walk out of the kitchen and find him standing here like a deer before a lantern— no, like a moth to a flame. And yet— and yet—

He stands there for seconds, minutes. Time trickles past him.

There’s a swish in the still air, a hum of feathers. Jester whispers, “Caleb? What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the very same thing,” Caleb breathes out, barely moving his lips.

“I was up in the tower and I came down at the same time you left the library,” Jester says. “So I followed you. But what are you doing? It’s late.”

“I don’t sleep well.”

“Nobody sleeps well here, Caleb.”

“I suppose not.”

“Did you want to see Fjord?” Jester asks.

Did he? He doesn’t know. A different problem. “I wanted something to eat.”

“Well, go in there, then!”

Caleb turns to look at her. “Do you really think that I should?”

“Of course,” she says. “Because you love him, and he loves you, and that’s how this is supposed to work, you know? Nothing’s perfect and we’re trapped in a cursed castle by a monster that wants to eat our souls, but it’s still pretty much like that.”

“I am not a good person, Jester...”

“So? True love still applies, Caleb! That’s what true love is.”

He looks at her. “You saw me run away from him and you still think that?”

“Of course I do. It’s not _easy_ or anything, but maybe it’ll work.”

“You are so hopeful,” Caleb whispers.

“If you don’t have hope,” Jester whispers back, “then you don’t have anything.”

“If this is another set-up—”

“It isn’t!” Jester says. “Not to break the curse. I guess I don’t know if that’ll work, really. I hoped it would. But—” She pauses. “He cares about you a whole lot, I’m pretty sure. Almost totally sure.”

“I know,” Caleb says.

“So go tell him,” she says. “Don’t worry, I’ll go back upstairs.” She darts a few feet back. When Caleb doesn’t move, she adds, “Go talk to Fjord!” and swoops back to the very threshold of the ballroom, nearly vanishing into the darkness.

Caleb turns, meaning to call after her.

There is a low metallic creak, and the brush of wood, and then two soft footsteps on the ballroom floor.

“Caleb?” Fjord says.

Caleb turns back slowly. Fjord is standing just past the threshold of the kitchen, one hand on the doorknob. He is thrown into silhouette by the wavering candlelight, and Caleb cannot see his expression.

“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” he says.

Fjord chuckles, almost. “I was already up. Did you want something?” When Caleb doesn’t reply, he offers, “I got out some of the smoked fish. And some biscuits. Haven’t touched much of it, but it’s there. If you want it.” He nudges the door open wider.

“ _Ja_ ,” Caleb says. “All right.”

Fjord turns back into the kitchen. Caleb follows him, but pauses before the threshold to look over his shoulder. The ballroom is dark; Jester is nowhere to be seen.

He enters.

Fjord has already seated himself at the small table. A single candle is on it, illuminating the room with a trembling yellow glow. The rest of the kitchen sinks into a deeper darkness as Caleb’s eyes adjust to the bright point of light, and he cannot look away from the table and the man sitting at it.

He takes the chair across from Fjord, who pushes his plate toward Caleb. There is a small, sharp knife laid on one side, beside a slab of smoked fish and several crumbling biscuits. Caleb takes a biscuit, but only turns it between his fingers.

“Haven’t seen you much lately,” Fjord says, after a long moment.

“I have not seen much of you either.”

“We might both be to blame, there.”

Caleb huffs a laugh. “ _Ja_. Maybe.”

“I am sorry,” Fjord says carefully, “if I offended you in some way. I certainly didn’t mean to push—”

“You did nothing wrong,” Caleb tells him. “Nothing. It was my fault.”

“Why did you leave?” Fjord asks.

Caleb stares at the candle flame. It bows and bends in the thin wind of their breathing, and he can see nothing else but the light. “You should not be close to me. It is... dangerous.”

“Is it?”

“ _Ja_.”

“Why?” Fjord says, and Caleb’s gaze slips upward. Fjord is watching him closely, his eyes brighter and more still than the candle flame. 

“I will tell you about it if you tell me what you are so afraid of. Why you spoke in a different voice in the attic, after we opened the book.”

“That sounds fair,” Fjord says, steady.

Caleb gathers himself, and says, “I have done... terrible things. I have been...” His gaze drifts back down to the candle. “I have been the worst kind of person. I was taught to— to kill. Traitors to the Empire.”

It’s all he can stomach saying, and he chances another glance up. Fjord—

Fjord hasn’t looked away.

“What?” Caleb asks. It comes out too small and too tired.

“You _have done_ ,” Fjord says. “ _Have been_. But not now?”

“No. Not now.”

“So what’s the danger?” Fjord asks.

“You do not believe me.”

“I believe you. Still thinking on that. But I just don’t understand what kind of danger you think you pose me.”

“The people who I worked with are still out there. They are worse— they have no qualms, no compunctions, about killing anyone in their path. They would string me up if they found me— me and everyone around me. That includes you. And everyone in this castle. If I were to be found here.”

 Fjord nods slowly. “Thank you for telling me.”

“You asked.”

“That I did. And you answered.”

“Your turn,” Caleb says. “What are you running from?”

Fjord chuckles, a low, rough sound. “I didn’t have much before the _Tide’s Breath_. No parents, no money. No prospects, especially not for someone like me.” He gestures at himself. “They don’t take well to my kind. Running away to sea was the best choice I ever made. Still didn’t change much. But I caught someone— a guy on my crew— trying to mutiny, and after that Vandren promoted me to mate. Then he gave the ship to me when he retired. I hired a new crew, all strangers.”

“And you are afraid of— what? That they will find out?”

“Something like that,” Fjord says. “I think you can understand. I like who I am now. And I do not want to go back to who I was.”

Caleb nods. “ _Ja_. I understand.” He pauses, trying to find the words. “Is that why you were worried you offended me?”

“Maybe,” Fjord says. “That felt like it mattered. I was... worried I’d do something wrong.”

“I do not think you did anything wrong.”

“I appreciate that,” Fjord says.

The candle flickers, slow. The width of the table is an ocean and an instant, and Caleb tries, but cannot tear his gaze away from the limned outline of Fjord’s jaw and the glinting shape of his eyes in the dimness.

“I was getting something to eat,” he says, and rises, turning to stare into the dark of the kitchen.

The light behind him shifts. He turns to find Fjord half-standing, holding out the candle to him. “Here.”

Caleb takes it carefully from his grasp, trying not to spill the wax. In the candlelight, he takes yesterday’s bread and a handful of tiny apples from the cupboard. He slips the apples into his pocket and tucks the loaf under one arm.

“Guess we should get to bed,” Fjord says. He’s still standing by the table, one hand resting on its surface as if to ground himself.

“You go,” Caleb says. He holds the candle out to Fjord, who shakes his head.

“Nah. I see just fine in the dark. You keep it. I know you can make lights, but—”

“So I will make my lights, and you will have the candle, and neither of us will be in the dark. All right?”

Fjord looks at him— looks _into_ him, with those steady golden eyes. “All right,” he says, and reaches for the candle. His fingers close over Caleb’s, softly enough that Caleb can slip away.

He doesn’t. Not immediately. He lingers long enough to dab a drop of wax away from its precipitous trickle down the side of the candle, and then he draws back. Without the warmth of the candle and Fjord’s hand on his, the air feels cold.

Fjord goes to the door, candle in hand, and holds it open.

“Thank you,” Caleb says, and steps out into the ballroom, casting a Dancing Light in the air before him. Fjord follows, closing the door quietly, and they cross the dark, empty room surrounded by a small halo of light. When they emerge into the hall, Caleb glances around, but neither Jester nor Yasha are anywhere to be seen.

Beside him, Fjord says, “I suppose this is where I say good night.”

Caleb turns to face him, and something leaps in his chest at the sight of Fjord, standing close, lips just parted, lit by bluish arcane light on one side and the trembling gold of a candle on the other.

“ _Ja_ ,” he whispers. “Good night.”

They part slowly, so slowly, in steps and turns that seem to take the whole world with them, and Caleb looks down from the stairs to see Fjord, too, glancing back.

Then the darkness swallows him, and Caleb ascends the staircase alone.

 

In the morning, Caleb goes to the library and begins to read again. He’s flipping through a thick book on druidic curses when the door creaks open and Fjord says, “Morning, Caleb.”

He’s smiling crookedly, holding a pastry wrapped in a cloth in one hand, and Caleb gets up to take it from him. “Good morning,” he says. “Come in.”

They spend the day reading, and they uncover absolutely nothing of note. Only the same waterlogged books and useless facts— facts that Caleb would gladly hoard at any other time, but which are not helping him now. He also locates another encrypted book, which is very helpfully titled _GENIVF JVYYVATUNZ'F LRR UNJ TNZR ENAPU_.

Finally, in the evening, Beau appears in the doorway. “Hey, guys. Dinner.”

They traipse down to the kitchen, where Caduceus, Jester, and Yasha are already waiting. “You’re here!” Jester calls, and waves at them; Caleb waves back as he and Fjord sit down.

“How has everyone’s day been?” Caduceus asks.

“Well, Beau and I played chess,” Jester says.

“For a given meaning of chess,” Beau adds, but her expression is soft anyway. “We alternated my rules and her rules. Went halves on wins and losses too.”

Jester shakes her head in mock disapproval. “My kind of chess isn’t hard, Beau! You just have to remember to use your trickster pieces, and then I’m sure you’ll be able to beat me. You got the hang of archer pieces just fine.”

“Yeah, well, archers make _sense_ ,” Beau says.

“What is a trickster piece?” Caleb asks.

“A trickster piece can antecede, of course!” Jester says. “Trickster pawns antecede diagonally, trickster knights antecede vertically, trickster empresses antecede in reverse— oh, and paladins can make tricksters, and archers can’t be anteceded until they’re off the board, which makes them indestructible since then they have priority. But if a paladin also goes off the board then it could antecede an archer, I suppose. Unless you have a quorum of trickster knights, and then a pawn could be planeshifted to antecede the archer. See? It’s simple.”

“Yeah,” Beau says. “Right. If we keep playing I’ll figure it out.”

“Of course you will!” Jester agrees. “It’s the best kind of chess. Anyway, Yasha, what did you do today?”

“Not very much,” Yasha says. “I went up to the tower and watched the sky. There was a storm up the coast, but it already passed over us.”

“Will it go over the village?” Caleb asks.

“Probably,” Yasha says. “But it won’t be very big. Caduceus, what did you do?”

“I checked on the mead this afternoon,” Caduceus says. “It’s coming along very well. Seems to be, anyway. The yeast is happy, so something is definitely right. And how was your day, Mister Caleb?”

“I’ve just been in the library,” he says. “There is a lot to read, and I am far from done.”

“Find anything useful?” Beau asks.

“Ah, unfortunately, I have not.”

“Still?” Yasha asks. “It’s been days.”

“ _Ja_ , still,” Caleb says, tearing a roll in two. “Nothing useful. Nothing to help us.”

“What about you, Fjord?” Jester asks.

Fjord doesn’t reply.

Caleb looks up from his roll. “Fjord?”

But Fjord remains perfectly, terribly still.

“What’s happening to him?” Jester asks, her voice shaking. “Caduceus, what’s happening? He’s frozen...”

“I don’t think he’s frozen,” Caduceus says, approaching Fjord across the table. “Look. He’s breathing. And his eyes are moving.”

Caleb looks closer, and makes out the rise and fall of Fjord’s chest in shallow breaths. His eyes are darting frantically, but not catching on any of them. “He is somewhere else,” Caleb says, “somewhere— in a vision, or possessed, I do not know—”

“Can we bring him back?” Beau asks. “Is this— this hasn’t happened before, right?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Yasha says.

“No,” Caleb says, feeling a chill rush down his spine. “This happened in the library. When the petal fell. He went quiet, and then...”

In the silence that falls after Caleb’s statement, there is a sudden rasp of breath, and Fjord begins to choke as water gushes from his mouth. Jester cries out, and Yasha moves to support him, but it’s over in seconds; when the water stops flowing, Fjord leans on the edge of the table and releases a long string of hacking coughs. Caleb reaches across the table and grabs his hand.

“There, there,” Caduceus is saying, a low nonsense patter, “you’re all right, we’re here, we’re with you...”

Fjord coughs, then coughs again and again, and finally gasps, “Uk’otoa...”

Caleb squeezes his hand tighter. “Fjord. Fjord, it’s all right. You’re safe.”

Fjord’s hand convulses in his, then grips on with a desperate strength. A breath surges from Fjord’s chest. Then another. Gradually, his breathing slows. He goes to wipe the blood and brine from his lips, and Caleb quickly lets go of his hand.

“The petal fell,” Fjord says finally. “We’re down to one.”

 

 

_VII. on a darkling plain_

 

The castle is quiet.

It’s always quiet, of course, but this morning the silence is palpable, no matter how hard anyone tries to break it. Caleb goes to the library earlier than usual; he hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and eventually gave up around five. He sits with Frumpkin around his neck and barely comprehends anything he reads.

Fjord appears an hour later, carrying both the morning’s bread roll and two cups of tea. From his haggard expression, Caleb guesses he didn’t sleep either. He takes the bread and one of the cups, but doesn’t retreat back to his chair, as he has every day before. Instead, he asks, “How are you doing?”

Fjord chuckles, or tries. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“You do not have to help me, you know.”

“No,” Fjord says. “No, I want to. Might as well.”

So they sit together beneath the leaded window, and as the morning draws on, the silence remains.

At mid-morning, Jester appears, calling, “Hi Caleb! Hi Fjord!”

“Hey, Jester,” Fjord calls back, waving. “Did you find Beau?”

“Yep, I did. She was up in the tower.” Jester swoops along the bookshelves, trailing her fingers over the spines.

Caleb looks up. “I found you some books, if you want. On the shelf below you.” He’d happened across _Sweet Molly Malone_ and _The Princess and the Fey_ while pulling down books the day before.

Jester dips down to look. “Oh. I’m not really looking for these right now? But thank you for finding them,” she adds quickly. “I’ll try them out, maybe.”

“You are not looking for... romance novels?”

“Well, maybe. I know they aren’t real, but they’re still fun to read. Only now...” She takes _Sweet Molly Malone_ off the shelf. “Maybe I want to be somewhere else for a little bit right now.”

“That might not be your best bet, then,” Caleb says.

Jester turns, shoulders up. “Why not?”

“Unless I am very wrong, that one is based on a song about a fishmonger who dies and returns as a ghost. It is a bit of a tragedy. But _The Princess and the Fey_ is a fairy tale.”

“Oh,” Jester says, and relaxes. She replaces _Sweet Molly Malone_ and picks up _The Princess and the Fey_. “I’ll try this one, then. Oh, and Caleb, I was going to ask, is your friend coming this morning? Nott?”

“Ah, _ja_ , she should be,” Caleb says. “She said she would visit today.”

“She hasn’t shown up yet.”

“No. She has not.”

“Well, how about this,” Jester says. “I think I’ll go back up to the tower anyway. So Beau and I will keep an eye out for Nott, all right?”

“All right,” Caleb says. “Thank you.”

“No problem!” Jester chirps, and swoops out the door.

Caleb continues to wait, but nobody runs into the library to tell him that Nott has arrived, and outside the frozen bubble of the curse it might be storming, just as Yasha said. Or perhaps Nott’s disguise was discovered, and she is alone...

Finally, past noon, Caleb takes the looking glass from the table and tells it, “I wish to see Nott the Brave.”

The surface swirls, flares, and resolves into an image of Nott’s face. Her mask and hood are on, her crossbow is in her hands, and she is running headlong through a dark cobblestone alley. Behind her, Caleb can just make out the uniforms and armor of Crownsguard barreling toward her, raising crossbows of their own.

The image vanishes.

“Caleb? Is something wrong?”

Caleb drops the looking glass and starts for the door— and then stops, and turns back. “ _Ja_ ,” he tells Fjord, “something is wrong. My friend— Nott the Brave— she is in the town, and she is being chased by Crownsguard. She is a goblin, she will be arrested— no, they will kill her if they catch her.” He picks up the looking glass again, turning it over in his hands, though he knows it only works once a day. “And I cannot go to her. I can’t leave this castle—”

“Course you can,” Fjord says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Caleb stares at him. “What? The curse—”

“You can go, Caleb. Yeah, it’ll make the curse drain some power, maybe take from me, but I’ll be fine. For a little while, anyway. You have to find your friend.” Fjord points toward the back of the castle. “There’s a back way down— a little path that goes out of the other side of the garden. Far as I can tell, it should take you there faster. It’ll keep you out of sight, anyway.”

“There is only one petal left,” Caleb protests. “The curse is nearly— is nearly _over_ , Fjord, you cannot simply—”

“Yeah, I can,” Fjord says, and he sets his book aside and gets up to stand before Caleb. “Listen. Family’s important. Doesn’t matter what you have to do, you protect your family. So go find her.”

“I will be back,” Caleb tells him. “I’m not leaving for good. I’ll come back, Fjord, I promise.”

“I believe it,” Fjord says, and Caleb turns and runs.

He rushes down the stairs, through the hall, and out into the garden. There’s a path that winds along the outer wall of the castle, and he follows it all the way around the garden until it leads to another path, this one ending at a small gate set into the fence.

Very carefully, Caleb extends his hand past the gate.

As soon as his fingertips reach over, there is a crackling sound, and a sparkling gap begins to appear in the air, as if a set of gauzy curtains were parted. Caleb feels nothing, but he can almost taste the energy pouring through the hole that he has just torn in Uk’otoa’s curse— powered, if that being is to be believed, by Fjord’s soul. Fjord, who told him, in no uncertain terms, to go now.

Caleb slips through the gate and starts running.

The path is narrow and winding, and it plunges downward through an endless chain of gullies and ravines. Caleb goes as quickly as he can, but he trips and stumbles more often than he runs. The air is thick with mist, and he can barely see ten feet in front of himself.

Still, even feeling a breeze is a blessing after the stillness of Windflower Castle.

It takes Caleb nearly an hour to reach the town, and when he does arrive, he’s covered in mud. He would’ve tried to disguise himself anyway, so it’s really a blessing, in a way, that he skidded through so many mud puddles.

He tugs his coat collar up around his face and hurries toward the outskirts of the town. The houses are small and ramshackle, and built at odd angles: crooked roofs, leaning walls, shutters hanging from their hinges. People are in the streets, but Caleb doesn’t pay them any mind. He’s looking for Nott, and failing that, the Crownsguard.

He ventures farther into the town, not making eye contact with anyone, and ducks into the first alley he spots to message Nott. Holding the copper wire to his lips, he whispers, “Hello, Nott, this is Caleb. I am in the town. I saw you running from the Crownsguard— are you safe? Where are you?”

“Caleb!” Nott whispers back, and his knees give out from the wave of sheer relief that hits him. Caleb sits down hard on the ground and leans back against the wall as Nott continues, “I’m still in town too! I’m safe, I got away, but where are you? You can reply to this message!”

“I’m in an alley on the east side of town,” Caleb replies, cupping the wire in his hands like a butterfly with a broken wing. “The inland side. Where are the Crownsguard?”

“They went up to the castle,” Nott says. “I’ll explain when I see you, wait there!”

Her spell cuts out, and Caleb sits in the alley, clutching the wire and hearing only his pulse roaring in his ears. If the Crownsguard are going to the castle— did they hear the stories, too? Do they believe that there is a golden-eyed, honey-voiced monster there?

Caleb gets to his feet and paces to the other end of the alley. He pokes his head out. No Nott.

He paces back.

Sixteen laps of the alley later, he hears clawed feet skittering over the rooftops, and then Nott hits the ground beside him. “Caleb!”

He drops to his knees and grabs her in a quick, hard hug, then sits back, hands on her shoulders. “What is going on?”

“The Crownsguard came,” Nott says. “They’re going up the coast fighting monsters and things— they killed a fiend in a traveling carnival that’s coming this way. They saw me, but I got away, and then someone told them about the castle.”

“Are they— they plan to invade it?”

“And go kill whatever monsters they find,” Nott says. “So you’ve got to go back to the castle and tell them that there are guards coming and they’re going to attack!”

“Nott,” Caleb says, struggling to keep his voice steady, “how long does it take you to get to the castle? On the path you usually take?” 

“Hour and a half,” Nott says. “Two hours uphill, sometimes.”

“And when did the Crownsguard leave town?”

“Half an hour ago.”

“There is a back path, Nott— I think it will be faster— but we have to go now.” Caleb pauses. “Will you come with me?”

“Course I will,” she says, and pats the crossbow slung over her shoulder. “We gotta go save your true love!”

And together, they bolt from the alley and make for the trail out of the village. Nott is far more agile than Caleb, and she stops and waits for him at the top of every hill. She knows him too well to ever suggest stopping for a break, so they press on, through gullies and over rockslides, up muddy slopes studded with pebbles that tear at the bandages on Caleb’s hands when he tries to catch himself. His breath is raw in his chest, but he keeps stumbling forward, his mind teeming with fears: the Crownsguard at the castle. The doors battered down. Fjord falling, again and again, to a thousand attacks, a thousand blades, a thousand crossbow quarrels.

He keeps running.

And finally, finally, he climbs the sloping side of a ravine and sees the dark, spired shape of Windflower Castle through the mist. There is a glimmering, dancing line of light above the gate: the curse remains torn.

Caleb, on a hunch, casts Detect Magic.

There is a flash of light behind his eyes, and then his vision clears, and he sees a rolling flood of energy pouring over the gate. More is leaking in from the edges of the tear, but it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough, and Fjord is somewhere inside.

Caleb runs for the gate and scrambles over it, Nott following close behind, and dashes through the garden at breakneck speed. He makes for one of the back windows and tries to pry it open, but finds it locked.

“Hold on,” Nott says, and scrambles up on his shoulders. Caleb braces himself against the wall as she picks the lock, and in an instant the window is open and she’s jumping through. He climbs in after her and holds out his hand, gesturing for her to stay quiet.

Windflower Castle is a silent place. Beneath Uk’otoa’s curse, no rain falls and no wind blows. So Caleb listens, and he hears shouts echoing distantly, and footfalls on stone, and the telltale hiss of a crossbow firing.

Then there’s a blast, loud and reverberating, and Caleb would think it was thunder but there is no thunder in Windflower Castle.

“What’s happening?” Nott asks.

“I don’t know,” Caleb says, and starts to run again, making his steps as quiet as he can. The shouting draws louder, and the hiss and smack of crossbow bolts loosing and hitting home carries on, and Caleb strains to hear a familiar voice, but he can’t make any of it out.

They skid to a stop just outside the front hall of the castle. Caleb takes a breath to steady himself, then peers around the corner.

A party of six Crownsguard are clustered between the two staircases. Two are groaning on the ground with a tall-case clock towering over them, and as Caleb watches, a blur of bronze limbs and tiny flames takes a third out at the knees. The remaining three are raising crossbows and sighting upward, toward the roof of the foyer.

Caleb looks up.

The foyer used to have a vaulted ceiling of smooth gray stone. Now, a massive crater has been blasted through the roof of the castle. Through it, Caleb makes out a sliver of sky and the crenellated tower wall, and between them, a familiar sea-green figure, raising a broad, arched sword in one hand.

“LEAVE THIS PLACE,” Fjord bellows, “AND NEVER RETURN!” He waves the sword, and perhaps the Crownsguard do not notice, but Caleb sees him sway on his feet. It might be blood on his shirt, or only shadows.

As one, the three remaining Crownsguard fire their crossbows.

Caleb reaches out, trying to cast a spell, any spell, but there’s nothing he knows that could prevent what happens next. The bolts strike home, and in a burst of light, they explode.

Then everything is dust and shadows and strange high ringing in his ears, and Caleb stumbles forward, trusting his memory to guide him. Figures move before him in the dust: three on their feet, half-carrying three more, and he lets them go. They aren’t important now.

The dust begins to settle, revealing a wide swath of sky high above the hall, where the ceiling once was. The tower is a broken shell, but this just as irrelevant as the Crownsguard dragging themselves away and Caleb keeps staggering forward. When he stumbles into the center of the hall, he falls to his knees before Fjord’s supine form, spread-eagled where he fell from the tower.

“Fjord,” he whispers. “Are you all right? Talk to me, Fjord, please.”

A breath struggles out of Fjord’s chest. Then back in. “Caleb?”

“ _Ja_. It’s me.”

“You came back,” Fjord says. His hand twitches, and Caleb grabs it, holds on.

“Of course I came back.”

“You didn’t have to. You could’ve left.” A smile forms on Fjord’s lips. “But I get to see you again, huh?”

Very carefully, Caleb leans forward and places his hand on the side of Fjord’s face. Fjord’s eyes focus slowly, and he smiles wider. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself,” Caleb says. “Listen— you are going to be fine, Fjord. You only fell from the tower, _ja_? You are hurt but it is—”

“Nah,” Fjord says. “This is— this is it, Cay. I mean, maybe if I wasn’t cursed, maybe if I didn’t break whatever I broke falling like that, but the last petal is...” His eyes go hazy, then slowly refocus, and he says, “About to fall. It’s about to fall. And I’m not gonna get through this one, I don’t think.”

Caleb shakes his head. “No. No, we will find something. We still have time, Fjord—”

“Didn’t you hear me? Please listen, Cay,” and Caleb registers the nickname for the first time, nearly chokes on the fear and grief welling up in his throat. “This is— I’m not gonna be around anymore.”

“No,” Caleb says. “No. You— you cannot go, Fjord, please...” He’s reduced to begging and he hardly cares.

“Would you tell me something?” Fjord asks, and his voice is hoarse and thin, but it’s a breeze in becalming to Caleb and he clings to it.

“Anything.”

“Did you— did you love me? Because I think I’m in love with you and I wish I’d told you earlier,” Fjord says. “That night at the ball, I meant to, but you ran, and all I could think was you didn’t—”

“Of course I feel that way about you,” Caleb tells him. It doesn’t matter. He can’t possibly hurt Fjord any more now. “Of course I do. You thought I— how could I not?”

Fjord turns his head, slowly, painfully, and kisses the side of Caleb’s hand. His lips leave flecks of blood and dust where they pressed. “Sorry,” he whispers.

“Don’t,” Caleb whispers back.

But Fjord’s cheek is a dead weight against his palm, and his eyes stare deep into some eldritch void, and somewhere, somewhere, the last petal of a dying windflower is falling.

Elsewhere in the hall, Jester tumbles from the air in a swirl of blue feathers, and when Beau catches her, she is already frozen. “Oh, dear,” Caduceus says, and then he exhales a last long trail of steam that vanishes upward, and he, too, falls silent.

“Jessie?” Beau says. “Jes, c’mon...”

Yasha looks up through the blasted roof of the castle, and the light falls on her face, and then she is still. Only her pendulum continues to swing, slow as a funeral march.

Beau stays standing, cradling Jester’s solid form, and she does not let go even as her robes turn to solid bronze and the candles on her hands and head go out.

The hall is silent.

Caleb sees none of this. Fjord is staring into nothingness, and his pulse is there but fading, like the tide going out after a storm. He knows, somehow, that Fjord will not awaken from this trance. This is the last petal, the last page; this is the end of the story and he is trapped within it, with someone he has grown to love dying beneath his hands.

There’s no defiance when he presses his lips to Fjord’s, and no benediction. Caleb leans his head on Fjord’s chest and lets the tears start to slip down his cheeks, and then he’s crying silently, his hands fisted in the filthy fabric of Fjord’s shirt.

_I wish_ , something within him screams, _I wish we had more time_... _true love’s kiss_...

But the castle remains still.

And then:

a breath.

Fjord’s chest rises shallowly, then falls. Rises, and falls again, and Caleb stays frozen where he is, face buried in Fjord’s shirt, unwilling to believe.

Then fingers pat shakily at his hair, and he pushes himself upright to see Fjord staring at him with wide golden eyes. “Caleb?”

“Fjord,” Caleb breathes.

“Yeah,” Fjord says. “Yeah. It’s me. Again. I think. Caleb—”

Caleb kisses him.

Fjord makes a small, startled sound, and then kisses back, one hand pulling Caleb closer. After a moment, he draws away, looking up. Caleb follows his gaze, to the roof, to the broken tower, and past it to the sky, where the clouds are growing lighter and lighter. Then, in a flash, they’re parting, and for the first time in centuries, sunlight blazes down into the crumbling shell of Windflower Castle.

And Beau’s robes unfold and her shoulders flex, and then she’s standing at her full height. Yasha draws a breath and the case of the tall clock expands until she can stretch her arms wide. Caduceus’s lanky body unfurls from the tiny ball of the teapot like a fiddlehead fern breaking open in the spring. And Jester sighs, and her body turns limber and she finds her feet again, and then she flings her arms around Beau’s neck and kisses her hard. The kiss doesn’t last very long; both of them are laughing and crying and clinging to each other.

“Who _are_ you people?” Nott asks. “Caleb, what is going on?”

“Fjord!” Jester shouts, and runs over, followed closely by Beau. “You’re alive!”

“Yeah,” Fjord says, grinning. “Guess I am.”

Jester whirls to face Caleb. “Did you kiss him? Was it true love’s kiss?”

“... _Ja_ ,” Caleb says. “Yes. I suppose it was.”

“Well, would you look at that,” Caduceus says with a smile.

Jester turns to Caduceus. “Did you know that would happen?”

“I thought it might,” Caduceus says. “I wasn’t sure, though. You cut it pretty close, Mister Caleb.”

“Right,” Caleb says. “ _Ja_. Sorry... about that.”

“No, I’m glad you took the time you needed,” Caduceus says. “That’s a good sign for a healthy relationship. Though you two probably need to have some serious conversations now.”

“Yeah,” Beau agrees. “Fuckin’ communication, guys.”

“You were down in the village, weren’t you?” Yasha asks Nott. “Did you hear about a circus coming through?”

“Yes!” Nott says. “There’s one coming up the coast right now. They’re only a few days away. Why, did you want to see a circus?”

“Just one in particular,” Yasha says. “If it’s the one I’m looking for.”

“Well, we could go,” Beau says. “Down to the town. I don’t know about you all, but I don’t want to stay here. And it looks like—” she looks out of the hole in the ceiling, where sunlight is still streaming down from a brilliant blue sky— “it looks like it’s gonna be a nice day.”

“It isn’t very far, is it?” Caduceus asks. “We could be there tonight. We’ll tell them the curse is broken and the castle is freed. See how they receive us.”

“It’s not like any of us have anything to take with us,” Jester says. “Since we were shipwrecked and all.”

“Yes, let’s go,” Yasha says. “Unless, Fjord— are you okay to walk?”

Fjord shrugs, then winces. “Uh. Maybe not. Kinda busted up.”

Caduceus peers at him. “Let me try something.” He raises his hands, seeming to concentrate.

Fjord gulps, then straightens. Some of the cuts and burns splattered across his skin seem to have faded. “Uh, Deucey? Caduceus? Was that a healing spell?”

“Yes,” Caduceus says, beaming. “The Wildmother is smiling on us again.”

Jester gasps, and then she splits into two different Jesters, both of which shriek with joy and high five each other before coalescing back into one person. “I can feel the Traveler!” She points at Fjord, who shivers all over and then rolls his shoulders with a look of relief. “You’re healed!”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m totally fixed,” Fjord says, “but that feels pretty darn good.” He looks around at the group. “Are we gonna go, then? We’re headed out?”

“ _Please_ ,” Beau says.

And together, they troop out of the castle and start down the long and winding path, beneath the golden afternoon sunlight that graces the Windflower Cliffs. Anemones in shades of red, blue, and violet turn their tiny faces to the sun, and when Nott picks a bouquet of them, there is no thunder, and there is no curse. Something in Caleb’s bones tells him there never will be a curse on these cliffs again.

 

 

_VIII. ah, love_

 

It is night. The moon rises, high and nearly full, above the cliffs, and the stars spiral in familiar shapes through the dark and cloudless sky. The sea is calm tonight, but it does not herald a storm.

Caleb is sitting on the porch of the inn and counting the constellations when the door creaks open behind him. He turns, and smiles, seeing Fjord emerge and shut the door quietly behind himself. “Hello.”

“Hey,” Fjord says, and comes to sit next to him.

They don’t speak for a while, but they drift closer, until Caleb can lean his head on Fjord’s shoulder. Fjord is warm in the cool night air, and Caleb finds himself wanting to simply stay as close as he can.

“We’ll have to talk about this,” Fjord says.

“At some point. _Ja_. About ourselves, our pasts. And what we are going to do next...”

“Not tonight, though.”

“No. Not tonight.”

“Good.”

Quiet, for a while.

“I feel like I ought to thank you.”

“What? Why?” Caleb sits back a little, turning to face Fjord.

“Well, you saved me,” Fjord says, looking a little amused. “True love’s kiss and all.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

“I don’t know what else it could have been.”

“I thought you might have done something...”

“No,” Fjord says. “No. I was just... drowning. That’s all.” He shakes his head, as if shedding water. “Point is. We’re something to each other, aren’t we?”

Caleb nods slowly. “ _Ja_. I think maybe we are.”

“So what do we want to do about that?”

“I want to kiss you more, if I’m honest,” Caleb says. Caution to the wind.

Fjord smiles, slow, an edge of tusk showing along his lip. “I think that can be arranged.” He reaches out, cups a hand to the back of Caleb’s head, pulls him in and kisses him slow. Caleb grips Fjord’s shoulder and leans into him. Fjord presses at the seam of Caleb’s lips, and Caleb pushes back, licks carefully into the heat of Fjord’s mouth. Grabs onto Fjord’s shirt and pulls him closer, as close as he can, until they’re pressed together from chest to thigh and it still isn’t close enough.

“To answer your question,” he breathes, eventually, when they’ve pulled apart by the barest space, “I want to find out. What we are to each other.”

“Yeah,” Fjord whispers back. “I’d like that.”

And the night falls over them, sweet and clear, and filled to the brim with starlight.

**Author's Note:**

> tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, beauty and the beast. // ah, love, let us be true to one another!
> 
> I have a lot of opinions about fairy tale adaptations, which can mostly be summarized by “keep the themes, lose what doesn’t translate, and make it queer”. If you want to talk about adaptation/storytelling/Beauty and the Beast, hmu on Tumblr @swallowtailed or in the comments below.
> 
> Lastly, if you enjoyed this fic, please do leave a kudos or a comment!


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